The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston

“She’d learned the concept of the fall-down effect in school, how timber production declined as old growth was depleted—logged. Whatever grew back would not equal what had been lost” (198). 

This metaphor for broken family ties is at the heart of Liz Johnston’s new novel, The Fall-Down Effect, but rather than a hard comparison, it is intended as more of a question. Once a family experiences a wholly destabilizing trauma, and is fractured—how does it heal or reform in the proceeding years, and is this recovery ever sufficient? 

Lynn is a former climate activist, a boomer mom in the 1980s who feels she has been forced into a family life that doesn’t suit her. A covert narcissist, her thoughts, early-on in the novel, primarily revolve around how she can adapt her children’s lives to better suit her. 

Sylvia, Fern and River are all young, and Lynn is home-schooling them, but in what feels like a lightbulb moment to her, she thinks: “they didn’t have to be hindrances to her efforts. She didn’t have to resent them for how little she did for the world beyond their home these days. Instead, they could help her make a bigger impact” (19). This bigger impact involves chaining her children to a tree, to block the felling of an old growth stand of cedars near their small town in the British Columbian interior. After the loggers arrive on scene, one man, wholly exasperated, calls Lynn crazy, and then tells her to “Stop telling everyone else how to live and take a look at yourself!” (29). As a man who believes the forest is nothing more than an exploitable resource, the irony is thick; in this novel, selfishness and misguided intent come from all sides. 

The land is being taken advantage of, and to an extent, so are the children—when Lynn leaves, choosing an independent life over her family, she thinks that they might be better off without her extreme influence. But that, of course, is one of the many lies she’s told herself to serve her own ends, and as the decades pass, she doesn’t “devote herself, her whole life, to fighting for this planet;” she becomes a librarian, whose actual job involves little connection to the land at all—except that the books she tends are made of pulp mined from the very woods she sought to protect.

Enter Fern, her middle daughter, who, now barely an adult, is too much like her mother for the rest of the family’s comfort. She brings her father Tom more than his share of angst, and after she commits arson, becoming an eco-terrorist, she flees across the border to hide somewhere in Washington State. In her final letter to her family, she writes: “I love you all, but if everything goes as planned, you’ll never see or hear from me again. I have to do something, and if I explained, you’d try to stop me” (110). This is a book that explores what humans destroy. We destroy the Earth; we can also destroy each other. 

Though, there is of course, hope here. You see it in the gorgeous similes that Johnston uses to paint a portrait of the landscape: “The bark smelled like dirt and toast and moss and cinnamon, and like none of these. It smelled only like itself, and it was her favourite smell,” and in the way the family (all except for Fern, who remains on the run) are able to reunite during the pandemic, of all times, when a wildfire threatens the apartment where Lynn and her partner live, sparking their return to the familial home she rejected over thirty years before. Grandchildren enter the picture, and in a touching detail, youngest sibling River names his daughter after his absent sister, Fern. The novel suggests that the antidote to the havoc we wreak might just be hope itself—after “twenty years of unsaid words” Fern’s longing becomes too acute. She sends a touching postcard to River, after reaching out to him through social media. 

Can people change? Can narcissists who are selfish and impulsive like Lynn and Fern ever recover enough to repair the emotional wounds they cause? Perhaps the novel doesn’t make any final decisions in this respect, though it does focus on the remorse that each woman comes to feel. 

With this in mind, at times it was difficult to understand why, as hurt as Fern was when her mother left, she followed an almost identical path without question. Why didn’t her experience of maternal abandonment evoke more empathy in her, the way her eldest sibling Sylvia turns into a kind of surrogate mother, until Tom marries again, and the saintly Jan comes on the scene? As evidenced by the quote above, Fern seems to know how much she’s about to hurt her father, a forest ranger who has only supported and cared for her with kindness and understanding, and her little brother River, who is so attached to her. Is there the suggestion in this choice, and the others Fern makes, that narcissism may be genetic? I say suggestion, because this literary novel is an exploration of family ties, and there is no sense that the answers are clear-cut. Nature and nurture create a whirlpool here, and Fern gets sucked in.  A cautionary tale, The Fall-Down Effect urges us to be gentler with one another and the environment; to be more thoughtful than thoughtless, and to thoroughly consider the viewpoints of others before making irrevocable decisions.

Allison Snelgrove

Allison Snelgrove is a writer and instructor living outside of Montreal, on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. In 2024, her unpublished novel, Like Trees in Fire Season, was shortlisted for the Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction. She holds both an MA and PhD in Études anglaises from l’Université de Montréal, and her writing has appeared in The New Quarterly, the creative anthology Festival du Homard, and in the Queen’s Undergraduate Review. You can find her online on Instagram @allisonsnel or on Academia.edu.