DWELLING, by Emily Hunt Kivel
In the New York of Emily Hunt Kivel’s beautifully radical debut novel, “Dwelling,” tenants find themselves out on the streets thanks to the mayor’s “Revitalization” project, wherein landlords are incentivized to turn their apartments into the equivalent of state-mandated Airbnbs. To readers living in metropolitan areas afflicted with their own housing crises, this premise will not seem implausible.
“The actions had all been engineered to seem so gradual,” Kivel writes, “even banal.” We learn of the cash-strapped mayor’s “landmark deal with the world’s leading vacation rental company,” the lifting of eviction restrictions and rent regulations, federal grants for urban restoration. We learn that “prices went up. Apartments crumbled down. … No one seemed to understand how, or why, or when to fight it. And who had the time? Who had the money to save money?”
Among the evicted is Evie, a 29-year-old graphic designer. With both parents dead and a younger sister, Elena, in a mental institution in Colorado, her first instinct is to ask her boss for a raise so she can put a down payment on a house. Naturally, she is turned down (“this isn’t just happening to you,” her boss says; “I don’t own either”). She stores her possessions in her landlady’s basement instead and hitches a flight to the fictional town of Gulluck, Texas. There, she is put up by a distant maternal cousin, Terry, who, as luck would have it, works in real estate.
With Terry’s help — and I implore you to read the following with a straight face — Evie moves into a house shaped like a shoe, has a spiritual revelation while looking at an old, giant fish, begins dating a locksmith named Bertie, decides to become a cobbler, is inducted into an International Grand Shoemaking Association peopled by immortal beings once employed by Voltaire and Cortés, and learns of a prophecy that will change the trajectory of her life.
Kivel’s magical realist plot can be described as a series of ordinary ideas taken to their logical extreme. Robbed of housing and with little money to her name, Evie moves into the only available, affordable property she can find. She takes up shoemaking in response to the organic demand of her community, whose members show up at her doorstep expecting this service daily. The novel sustains the same cool, free-indirect prose across both its social realist beginning and the more fantastical plot that follows, making the latter feel wholly natural.
As such, “Dwelling” is wise on the very real-world themes of dispossession, community and material ownership. Forced to leave behind her parents’ heirlooms on moving to Texas, Evie tries to rationalize away her sentimentalism: She “had been told that an accumulation of stuff was unhealthy anyway, that clutter was an obstacle to mental clarity, or efficiency, or productivity, or something.” The more deprived she becomes, the more this sounds like brainwashing designed to make those who own so little accept their meager circumstances.
It’s only by seizing the means of production that Evie is able to find stability. In contrast to her former job (“choosing typefaces and superimposing them onto photographs taken by someone else”), the actual, physical labor of making and fixing shoes becomes an emancipatory act that, along with the basic generosity offered to her by strangers, empowers her to live a better, more meaningful life.
“We’re both heroes,” Bertie tells Evie when he considers the work — material, emotional — that they’ve undertaken together. For once, that kind of terminology isn’t corny: “Dwelling” deserves the plaudits it will surely get and more. It’s hard to believe that a work so seemingly effortless and original could be a debut. Certainly, it’s the most fun I’ve had reading in years.
DWELLING | By Emily Hunt Kivel | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 306 pp. | $28
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