Radtke is a familiar sort of narrator: someone seemingly compelled to search for everything that’s not in front of her. She’s driven to seek out new experiences that push her away from family, friends, and her fiancé: She leaves Chicago to adventure through Italy but feels acutely alone there, backpacks around Europe yet wants to go somewhere more dangerous or exciting, plans to marry and then vacillates, finds a rare employment opportunity after graduate school but feels trapped in Kentucky, where she becomes an insomniac. At one point she admits, “Being stuck in one place probably always makes you think about another”—perhaps a typical statement for someone in their 20s who doesn’t know what she wants. But Radtke connects her ennui to a wider landscape, finding a counterpoint to her disquietude in the world of ruins: abandoned towns, crumbling monuments, and cities destroyed by natural disasters or economic downturn.

About halfway through the book, Radtke seems to diagnose herself with what the scholar and artist Svetlana Boym referred to as “ruinophilia,” a fascination with the destruction and decay of physical structures. Boym considered this obsession with ruins not merely a form of modern malaise but also an active source of meaning-making, an exploration of what she called “the riddles of human freedom.”

For Radtke, whose life has been punctuated with the passing of loved ones—from her grandmother to her beloved Uncle Dan, whose death from congenital heart failure serves as a worrying backdrop to her own occasional palpitations—empty mining towns and contaminated environmental zones provide an inexplicable form of comfort. They are historical markers of mortality, of how everything must eventually bend under the weight of time. In the same way that her family’s memory of her uncle begins to fade as the years go by, so disintegrating structures move on from what they once were. The military ruins on the Filipino island of Corregidor or the abandoned city of Angkor Wat, for example, which once promised progress and brimmed with civilization, are, she writes, like “the edge of something new against the edge of something old, and both just as empty.”

To many a painter and poet, decay has provided artistic inspiration, and Radtke renders it beautifully too, shading the walls of an old, gutted theater in gradients to depict moisture; sketching over archival photographs as if to revitalize them; and, in one particularly moving two-page sequence, capturing her stagnating relationship with her partner by showing a thick film of toxic-looking dirt slowly climbing up their bedroom walls and enveloping them in darkness. Documenting nighttime walks along Iowa’s railroad tracks and trips to Icelandic volcanoes that threaten to wipe out all proximate life, Radtke is able to create beautiful if odious universes out of the potential of ruin, finding infinitesimal shades of nuance within a soft, greyscale palette.

Pantheon

Radtke also recognizes that all ruins, while captivating to peer at, are in some capacity predicated on destruction. She seems wary of turning her ruinophilia into “ruin porn” by glorifying the aesthetic value of disrepair and ignoring the human suffering that often accompanies it. Still, she writes, over a series of Biblical images showing New York City being submerged underwater, “We all do it … fantasize disaster.”