A Brooklyn Renter’s Odyssey
Evie Cavallo is a young woman who lives in a shoe. To be specific, she rents a twenty-foot-tall cowboy-boot-shaped building, with an industrial-grade kitchen and deteriorating bistro chairs. She has to inform confused visitors, repeatedly, that this is her home. What is this doing to her psychologically, Evie wonders. Also: could it be true? “Dwelling,” Emily Hunt Kivel’s kooky, endearing fairy tale of a début novel, is interested in the wobbly line between what’s real and what’s not, and in the way that saying things can make them so.
Evie’s hero’s journey begins, as so many do, with a problem that spurs her to action: she, along with every other renter in New York City, is being evicted to make way for vacation homes, in a surreal, class-stratifying upheaval reminiscent of the pandemic lockdowns. Entitled, somewhat resourceful, and lightly employed, Evie assumes she will figure something out. She disdains her neighbors’ plan to become Tenants in Common with six others. “They’d share one sock,” Evie thinks, later telling herself “there was no way . . . she was sharing a sock.” Others make plans to move near family. Evie, though, has no such option. Both of her parents have died, and her sister, Elena, lives in a hippie psychiatric institution in Colorado. So Evie makes her way to Gulluck, Texas, to impose on a distant cousin she has never met. She has no desire to leave Brooklyn, or to see the rest of the country. “I’ll be back,” she tells her landlord’s portly, benevolent son Obed when leaving New York. “I live here.” She can work her graphic-design job remotely in the meantime.
In Texas, a baffled Evie becomes alert to her surroundings: she notices that what seem to be windows are actually paintings of windows; she observes that a group of passersby appeared, at first, to be a painting of pedestrians. “Gulluck,” she thinks, “made no sense.” But, like any fairy-tale heroine, she swiftly finds helpers. Her cousin, a real-estate agent, assists her in locating the boot. Her new boyfriend, Bertie, a good-natured key-maker who is either enchanted or just seems that way to Evie because she’s falling in love with him, orients her in her new home. A sage adolescent cousin tells her: “You live here now.” But when Evie learns that Elena’s institution is teetering toward the cultish, she embarks on a journey to rescue her—a mission she seems unequipped to carry out. “She would get her sister,” Kivel writes, with characteristic understatement, “whatever that entailed.”
That the evictions are under way on page 1 of the book means that Kivel spends little time on the mundanities of Evie’s life in Brooklyn. In a sense, she’s a familiar type of literary protagonist: she lives alone, has few friends, and works an unfulfilling computer job. But Kivel’s is not a novel interested in reflecting the ennui of everyday life through descriptions that replicate a character’s boredom. Instead, it places its subject in novel situations, and allows her to learn and do things. Things can happen, even to uninspired women in New York, Kivel suggests. When Evie gets kicked out of her apartment, following a series of menacing incremental shifts in housing policy, she gains awareness of herself as a character in a larger narrative; she realizes that “it had all led up to this exact moment, this tragicomic climax.”
At first, the book’s canny political observations come up against Evie’s naïveté. Our protagonist is “intelligent, basically, but not very perceptive,” we learn, someone who “wasn’t used to thinking through anything more than once.” In the city, the narrator adroitly reports the texture of the world—the inexplicable ass spanks and wayward heads of lettuce and Cheerio-munching rats—while Evie lurches around, a whimsical and slightly daffy playing monologue in her head: “Sometimes Evie imagined the land, the world, the city around her as a cartoon neighborhood, the houses’ edges elastic like balloons.” As she progresses on her path to self-knowledge, she starts to see more clearly, though Kivel makes the world around her all the more strange.
Kivel’s narration remains droll and nonchalant, practically taunting the reader, as Evie’s circumstances become more and more absurd. An eviction happened? Yep. And her new house is a boot? O.K. And a lion with “ridiculous buck teeth like those in a ventriloquist dummy” crosses her path? These things happen. Various side characters have a similarly unfazed air: telling Evie she may fulfill a prophecy, a new mentor in Gulluck adds, “no pressure at all.” Kivel keeps things moving, with a style that is frank, descriptive, and dry. “All of a sudden she had a house. That house was a shoe,” she writes. “The next chapter happened in a whirlwind, the way many next chapters of many stories do.” If the first pages of the book suggest the immovability of the status quo, Kivel intervenes by rendering a world in which the rules can change at any moment.
Much of Evie’s new understanding, of herself and of her environment, originates from those around her, especially her new boyfriend. “You’re a kind of hero,” Bertie tells her. “We’re both heroes.” And it is Bertie who helps her unlock a sense of agency, by encouraging her to take up a new vocation, as a cobbler. Evie, who at the start of the book is in the camp of idle, underemployed protagonists that stud much of contemporary fiction, begins to find meaning in her work. Her graphic-design job—a gig that placed her in “a league of sullen, pretty women who . . . cultivated their eyebrows and earrings”—had mostly involved “choosing typefaces and superimposing them onto photographs taken by someone else.” Her approach to shoemaking, in contrast, is sensual and responsive, rendered in lush, winding sentences that mimic the objects’ well-honed contours. In one early creation, Kivel writes:
Evie’s shoemaking teacher soon tells her that she is ready to leave class and go out on her own, seemingly a wish-fulfilling analogue of the M.F.A. classroom. (Kivel has an M.F.A., and has taught creative writing.) One wonders if the book’s faith in the redemptive power of craft, and the limits of the classroom, echoes the novelist’s own philosophy.
To Kivel’s credit, these passages on the ardor of creation are some of the only parts of the book that seem based on a writer’s life. “Dwelling” is squarely focussed on what could happen in a world that is deeply, invigoratingly made up. Allusions to myths, fables, and riffs on common idioms abound, many of them evocative and quite funny. The sky over Gulluck recalls an illustrated children’s Bible. Evie’s old boss, sending his spaniels to safety in a helicopter, holds them up as if he were “an unwavering Abraham with two miniature Isaacs.” Some of these flourishes feel a touch gratuitous: milk is spilled; repeated Amelia Bedelia-esque references are made to Evie’s sister losing her marbles; and, of course, there’s the name—yes, this Eve bites into an apple. The allusions can seem ornamental, but they also remind us that Evie’s world is much like our own, only stranger: the same old stories repeat themselves, just not in the way you’d expect.
“Dwelling” is among a crop of novels this year about lonely young women who channel their disaffection into long, unusual quests. Sophie Kemp’s début novel, “Paradise Logic,” narrated in a deranged, headlong style, spends its prologue teeing up a prophecy (foretold “from the moment she was bornth”), before sending its protagonist, a jarringly jejune twenty-three-year-old Brooklynite named Reality, on a journey to become “the greatest girlfriend of all time” to a loser grad student named Ariel. (Along the way, she’s helped by obscure drugs, energy drinks, and interventions from talking animals and weird girls.) In Brittany Newell’s “Soft Core,” a San Francisco ghost story of sorts, a sex worker named Ruth goes on a journey to find her missing ex-boyfriend. Though not explicitly fantastical, there is a layer of the surreal—or is it just paranoia and hallucination that make Ruth think she sees him at the bus stop, on sidewalks, in the club? In these books, young women are constrained by the demands of femininity, yet they embrace the full range of tactics—and antics—at their disposal to gain a sense of control. They live in their bodies; they spend little time on their phones. Even as their worlds are distorted, they adapt.
In “Dwelling,” Kivel cribs the plot conventions of fairy tales, and their strident moral logic, too. “The state of housing across the country was a point of national pride or a catastrophic embarrassment, depending on whom you asked,” the narrator intones, early on. She threads explicit commentary on the housing crisis through the book: Elena becomes imperilled after a condo developer buys the land that houses her institution; a teen-age cousin journals about his fears that he may never afford to leave his parents’ home in Gulluck. True to fairy-tale tropes, Evie’s landlord, Edita, has an exterior that conveys her hideous character, with long fingernails and steam erupting from her ears. When Evie returns to the old apartment, Edita taunts her with memories of her pathetic past as a Brooklyn renter: “What a lonely, lonely girl. She has no friends, she has no family, she doesn’t do anything, nothing, just goes to work and back again.”
It should come as no surprise that Evie gets a happy ending after all this—that after completing several feats of bravery, with the help of her new friends, she returns safely to the boot. One might detect a trace of pessimism in Kivel’s social critique here, in the implication that finding all of this—a rich community, a fulfilling vocation, an affordable place to live—is the stuff of fantasy. (Or at least requires leaving New York.) Evie leans on a bit of magic, it’s true, but what she actually gains from her adventure is far more modest: sincerity, dedication, openness to the world. She goes from dismissing the shared sock to living in a shoe with almost everyone she knows. ♦
