A novel by Nini Berndt
Tin House, June 2025
Desire is the driving force of any story. What do the characters want? In There Are Reasons For This, Nina Berndt’s thought-provoking debut novel, many of the characters are numb to desire because the world around them is so depressing. And no wonder. The novel is set in Denver, slightly in the future, where eco-systems and culture are collapsing due to the climate crisis. It’s a city where there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do because most places are closed. Traditional jobs have been replaced by AI and robots, and those who actually do go to work have “a job that so far deemed the human mind necessary.” One of these is in the human servicing sector, where the government pays people to comfort and cuddle others. Sometimes they just hold hands and listen to their clients. As the manager says, “They might not know what it is they want, they might just know something is missing.”
One of these professional cuddlers is Helen, a gay woman who has avoided love her whole life. She is surprised to find herself becoming attached to a young man, Mickey, a recent arrival from eastern Colorado, where he left behind cold parents and a beloved sister, Lucy. Mickey comes to a bad end and both Helen and Lucy are devastated. In time, Lucy comes to Denver to stalk this ‘Helen’ person that Mickey had told her so much about. She moves into Helen’s apartment complex, and connects with her without revealing she is Mickey’s sister. Lucy gets a job as a “granddaughter” for an older woman upstairs, another paid comfort job, and mostly takes her to the pool, although the weather is often too extreme for even that. Everyone’s days are dictated by the omnipresent Air Monitor, which tells them when it is safe to go outside. “Fires. In Kansas a flood. In the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, it snowed.” Some countries are faring better than others. Norway for instance, which has closed its borders “to preserve its pleasantness.” There is a war somewhere. And there is a rumor of a killer on the loose called the Jumper, seen flitting about the neighborhood. The air smells of “dust and sand a smell like chicken bones.” During the frequent water restrictions, the Air Monitor asks for restraint “for the good of the earth,” a plea that falls on exhausted ears. As Helen says, the Air Monitor gives “so many warnings, none of them mattered anymore.”
How to cope with life in this depleted world? Aside from the cuddlers, the government encourages the use of designer pharmaceuticals with names like Vygorium and Tryfeusil. Maegreta makes you feel like you’re flying, and Emperadine is for existential angst. All funded and promoted by the state. “Take something, the country said. It will help.” But like the Air Monitor, the pills make it hard to know what matters. One of my favorite lines takes place in a restaurant that only the very wealthy can afford, which has human servers instead of robots: “’Please,’ a woman was saying to a server. ‘Don’t ask me that. I’m in a flow state.’”
Artificially-induced emotions only work until they don’t, so when all else fails, you might just try old-fashioned human connection. Or as the cuddling handbook says, “Human touch is required for the balanced generosity of the human spirit and the continued existence of our species.” But outside of paid cuddlers, finding a human to love is not easy in this world. Finding the desire needed is even harder, and is often thwarted by environmental challenges. Lucy runs outside to try to be on the street when Helen returns from a gig, and “tiny particles of charred forest fluttered down and covered the hoods of cars.” As Helen makes her way home, “Ash was in her hair and her mouth and on her legs, which were glowing in the strange gray light.” But they persevere. In the epigraph, the postmodernist Donald Barthelme writes: “Some people have forgotten how to want.” With this book, we are reminded that no matter the circumstance, it is possible to remember.
JoeAnn Hart writes about the pervasive and widespread effects of the climate crisis on the natural world and the human psyche. Her most recent book, Arroyo Circle, a story of reclamation in a time of loss, was released by Green Writers Press in 2024. Her other books include the prize-winning environmental and animal fiction collection Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, the crime memoir Stamford ’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s, as well as Float, a dark comedy about plastics in the ocean published by Ashland Creek Press, and Addled, a social satire. She is a regular reviewer of climate and animal fiction at EcoLit Books.
