The last day of maternity leave, and an unnamed mother of two decides to stage a “yes day”, full of treats and good feelings. Of course it does not go according to plan: the treats are deficient, misjudged and underappreciated; the good feelings are fleeting, quickly upstaged by anxiety, guilt or humiliation. This familiar-sounding scenario is the simple yet bracing premise of Lisa Owens’s second novel, following her impressive first comic fiction of female-centred modernity, 2016’s Not Working.

The academic E Ann Kaplan once wrote that “motherhood is the major emotional experience of my adult life” – certainly a relatable observation, and reason enough why some writers may swerve going through the experience altogether. But when using it as narrative material, the aim is to render the cluttered yet lonely planet of motherhood in some new way, drawing on the energies of honesty and idiosyncrasy to frame a common, universal adventure as something singular and memorable.

The day begins at 5am, when Felix is woken by his baby brother Rudy, sending the “Three Musketeers” – mother and her two boys – down to the kitchen for a “special” breakfast. The father and husband, also unnamed, is away at a health-tech conference in Barcelona, and remains a shadowy, loaded presence throughout the novel, the focus of various “differently shaped parcels of resentment” including suspicions of adultery and gaslighting, depending on his wife’s experience at any given moment. To wider society – doctors, cashiers – she does have a name: “Mum”, which is how she is referred to during a sticky moment in a shop where Felix has a violent tantrum, and later during the medical emergency which takes over the second half of the book. This blanketing, anonymous term of address is an example of the achingly exact realism Owens achieves in her account, in which a woman’s identity is usurped by the immediate existential requirements of her children; she becomes “a flat, rudimentary approximation of a person, lacking in nuance or finesse”.

It’s the people closely surrounding “Mum” who embody the bold colours and textures of the novel’s precision. Her retired parents are deftly drawn, at once playful and commanding in a crisis, while the children themselves are full of life and entertainment, springing off the page in their convincing rambunctiousness, and also in how much they are loved. The cruel moments of maternal battering, such as “Felix’s bike pedal brutalising her shins every few metres” as she is pushing the buggy in the rain, sit movingly alongside lasting observational description: the little boy’s equal capacity for rage and forgiveness, “a marshmallow of love in his puffy winter coat”. It’s not easy to get children right in novels, but when it is done well they become a winning literary charm.

As we follow the Three Musketeers through the trials of their day, there are occasions where the minutiae of parenthood become perhaps too precise, too involved, and we are taken too thoroughly into logistics, such as the details of acquiring baby paraphernalia from Gumtree and the exact contents of a fridge. This gives Natural Disaster a slightly plodding effect, but it is also, it could be argued, a feature of its realism: the slowing of time that motherhood can bring about, the yawning length of a day that can in turn slow one’s thoughts to fixate on the mundane and prosaic while the “active” world rolls on outside. “Her whole being is marbled through with guilt of it all,” Owens writes in anticipation of her character going back to work, “but a significant part of her has been hungering to return”, to escape the regular plummet into “a black hole of dead-eyed apathy”, as a “pinched, warped, hollow being”.

Amid the humour and viscera of marital squabbles, accidental texts, a mysterious tampon and breastfeeding on the toilet, serious issues are addressed about the modern woman’s practical and emotional responses to “having it all”, and whether any real contentment might be found down that path. Is it better to focus on your children until they are of school age, or to work all the way through using nannies and nurseries, possibly producing more confident, resilient offspring? Is it possible to maintain a sense of self throughout the wonders and woes of the maternal rollercoaster, or do we change irrevocably and for ever, becoming merely an outline, waiting to be refilled? These are eternal, ever-repeating questions, and Owens does not attempt to answer them, only to reflect on the heightened particulars of a singular, emotionally myriad experience. Both sobering and celebratory, this novel is a powerful addition to the literature of surviving procreation.

Diana Evans is the author of I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations and A House for Alice.

In 1986, two catastrophic events occurred on either side of the cold war divide that shocked the world. On 28 January, 73 seconds after takeoff, the US space shuttle Challenger broke apart in mid-air, killing all seven astronauts on board and traumatising millions of viewers watching live on TV. Three months later, on 26 April, a meltdown at Chornobyl sent a radioactive cloud across the USSR and Europe. Two workers died immediately and the estimated death toll over time ranges from hundreds to tens of thousands. It’s widely believed to have contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In his 2019 book Midnight in Chernobyl, the British writer Adam Higginbotham reconstructed the latter event in forensic detail, building up to the meltdown and tracking its aftermath with the skill of a great thriller writer. It’s one of the most queasily compelling books I’ve ever read, and the scenes in which ill-equipped workers venture into the stricken reactor in the hope of containing the fallout are permanently seared into my memory.

Now Higginbotham is tackling the former event, and despite the awful spectacle of the Challenger disaster and the media frenzy around it at the time – heightened by the presence on board of the charismatic schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe – it would seem the more difficult of the two incidents to turn into a nonfiction page-turner tense enough to make your palms sweat.

For one thing, the Challenger’s demise – though it punctured Nasa’s reputation for competency under pressure, and rattled the US’s conception of itself as a spacefaring nation – did not have the empire-toppling force of Chornobyl, which also hobbled the cause of nuclear energy. For another, though the key event at Chornobyl unfolded very quickly, the danger persisted long after the meltdown and rippled outwards to affect millions of people. The Challenger disaster, by contrast, was over within seconds, and besides the impact on the astronauts and their families, the main damage in the aftermath was to the reputations of those who pushed for the launch despite being aware of fatal flaws in the technology.

Then there’s the sheer volume of technical detail. Midnight in Chernobyl had its share of heavy-duty analysis of how reactors work, and catastrophically fail, but this pales in comparison with the shuttle programme, which has so many moving parts, each complex in its own way, that a writer as thorough as Higginbotham has to work doubly hard to make it all comprehensible.

It helps that he’s extremely good at explaining the intricacies of the world’s first reusable manned spacecraft – the most complicated machine in history, he calls it, with its alarmingly rickety rocket boosters and its infernal jigsaw of heat-insulating tiles, which covered the surface of the shuttle to prevent it from burning up on re-entry. He’s illuminating, too, on the labyrinthine workings of Nasa, which by the 1980s was underfunded, stiflingly bureaucratic and yet wildly overambitious in its mission to make space flight as routine as air travel.

The experience of reading Challenger is a bit like blasting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stretch can be heavy going, requiring the full thrust of Higginbotham’s prose to propel us through the technical and institutional nitty-gritty while also familiarising us with a wide cast of characters – from the astronauts and the top brass at Nasa over three decades to lowly engineers working for contractors around the country. But then, after a couple of hundred pages, the weight of exposition drops away and we cruise with ominous ease towards the events of 28 January 1986.

That we know exactly what’s in store makes the journey no less nerve-racking, largely because Higginbotham is so adept at bringing characters to life, often within the space of a paragraph. One Nasa honcho is described as “secretive, inscrutable, and machiavellian… the Thomas Cromwell of the Johnson Space Center”. As we spend more time with the Challenger crew members, their individual quirks and passions emerge. Ron McNair, one of Nasa’s first Black astronauts and a talented jazz musician, is determined to broadcast himself playing saxophone live from space. Middle-school teacher McAuliffe, who charms everyone with her gee-whiz enthusiasm, fearlessly swings a supersonic jet into a barrel roll when she’s handed the controls during a training flight.

As the astronauts become more vivid on the page, we watch helplessly as repeated attempts to deal with the shuttle’s key weakness – the rubber seals preventing the release of hot gas within the rocket boosters – fail to resolve the problem. It wasn’t just a technical impasse; outside pressures on the shuttle programme meant that higher-ups at Nasa and its contractors were prepared to ignore the warnings in order to stay on schedule. Higginbotham’s account of an emergency meeting on 27 January about the disabling effect of low temperatures on the seals demonstrates this in shocking detail.

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As in the case of Chornobyl, blame also resides with the politicians who heaped pressure on the programme even as they hacked away at its budgets. The media, which hounded the astronauts before the launch and their grieving families afterwards, also come in for criticism. But this is primarily a story of corporate and institutional malfeasance, and echoes of the 1986 disaster – the corner-cutting and the suppression of safety concerns – can be felt in the crisis currently besetting the plane manufacturer Boeing.

Higginbotham’s latest may lack the feverish radioactive pulse and vast dramatic scope of Midnight in Chernobyl, but once it gets over the initial hurdles it’s still one hell of a ride.

• Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham is published by Viking (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

This is the latest installment of Public Streets, an urban observation series created by Ellis Avery and curated by Abigail Struhl.

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After the pandemic struck Mexico City in early March, the frantic rhythm of urban life slowly began to wind down to a standstill—like a giant animal clumsily tumbling into its deathbed. The hip and thriving Roma neighborhood, a usual meeting point for both young residents and tourists, suddenly looked like a little provincial town in the middle of nowhere: a car here or there, forsaken gardens in once-crowded plazas, businesses in ruin, all sounds safely sealed behind the walls of its mid-20th century townhouses and apartment buildings. It was a peaceful image, but also, in a way, an apocalyptic one. And, to be sure, for most residents of the capital, it was like witnessing an impossible sight, an aberration.

Historians date the explosion of Mexico City’s growth as somewhere in the 1970s. By the mid-’80s, in any case, the city’s population had already reached 14 to 16 million inhabitants (the figure is a little above 20, nowadays). In just one decade (1970–80), the number of registered cars tripled. Suburban neighborhoods probably did so, too. Pollution expelled the volcanoes from the landscape, and crime grew out of control. Witnessing such a rapid and dramatic transformation, writers in the 1990s, such as Carlos Fuentes, Hugo Hiriart, or Guillermo Sheridan, could not help but turn the city into the setting of a series of apocalyptic novels that flirted with the idea of a coming disaster.

With the pandemic, Mexico City is living through a disaster of its own—a very real one. Those apocalyptic writers in the 1990s could only imagine the end of the city as a tumultuous affair, so they would likely be surprised by the suddenness with which the capital took on the guise of a ghost town.

Lockdown in Mexico City was a peaceful image but also, in a way, an apocalyptic one.

Hiriart published, in 1992, a novel titled La destrucción de todas las cosas (which could be rendered in English as The destruction of everything). Closely rewriting the history of the Spanish conquest of Aztec Tenochtitlan, Hiriart describes the conquest of modern Mexico City by an army of aliens. The aliens arrive to a city already drowning in chaos, so much so that they are forced to assume that it is actually a Mexican war strategy. The narrator, a chronicler of his hometown’s destruction, gloomily dispels this notion: “But you will ask, who governed Mexico? Truth is nobody knew anything. We weren’t dribbling or doing shadow boxing; we simply couldn’t look far ahead.” Hiriart’s novel thus places its bet for the capital’s end in the boisterous self-sabotage of a disorganized urban machinery, in which, as a traditional saying goes, everyone just wanted to draw water to their own mill.

But by far the best-known chronicler of daily life in the apocalyptic Mexico City of the 1990s was pop-culture enthusiast Carlos Monsiváis. His 1995 Los rituales del caos (loosely, The chaos rituals) employs the street-level point of view of the flaneur, in order to capture an array of fleeting scenes in the megalopolis. His chronicles combine description with a series of statements that revolve around the unrestrained chaos of urban life. He claims, for instance, that the city “is the multitude that surrounds the multitude,” or that daily traffic jams are “a prison with mobile cells.” He further brands the city “the lab of extinction” and argues that people who use the subway in rush hour have to learn the skill of losing body mass all of a sudden only to recover “their usual weight and form” once they step out of the train (YouTube videos featuring the infamous Pantitlán station may confirm this).

In the end, Monsiváis claims, “staying in the capital of the republic means facing the risks of pollution, the ozone, thermal inversion, lead in the blood, violence, the rat race, the loss if individual meaning.” Monsiváis, like Hiriart, is baroque in style. Both authors provide labyrinthine texts riddled with complex syntaxes—not to mention an overdose of adjectives, or the fact that enumeration is their distinctive stylistic trait, one that creates a sense of excess. It is as if these authors want their sentences to be as chaotic and exaggerated, as crowded and paradoxical, as agglomerated as the city they are trying to describe appears to them.

After almost half a year disguised as a quiet little town that would have shocked the likes of Monsiváis and Hiriart, Mexico City seems to be slowly waking up again, quite possibly to a new reality. With the region still surfing the pandemic wave and already on the shore of a severe economic depression, though, the lingering calm feels like the few seconds that precede one of those deafening summer storms that, every afternoon, fall on top of the city that used to be a big lake hidden high up in the mountains.

 

This article was commissioned by Abigail Struhl. 

Featured image: Calle Madero totalmente vacía: Una escena para no olvidar (detail) (2020). Photograph by Eneas De Troya / Flickr