THE HITCH, by Sara Levine
Aunts! They march through literature: Patrick Dennis’s Mame, Noel Streatfeild’s Dymphna, P.J. Wodehouse’s Agatha and Dahlia, and — most complicatedly — Graham Greene’s Augusta. But most often as dotty sidekicks or pinafored spinsters, judging or being judged. “Materteral,” the feminine equivalent of “avuncular,” hardly rolls off the tongue.
In “The Hitch,” the warm and goofy second novel by Sara Levine, an aunt is not only the star of the story, but also narrates and thereby controls it. Barely — as if holding the retractable leash on which the plot turns.
Rose Cutler is an artisanal yogurt mogul living in Chicago whose latest flavor, Gotcha Matcha!, isn’t selling well (“tastes like seaweed and chalk,” according to her young social media manager). It also might have contamination problems.
Childless by firm choice, she is nonetheless eagerly anticipating the arrival of her 6-year-old nephew, Nathan, for a weeklong visit — with carefully planned vegan menus dimly inspired by “The Enchanted Broccoli Forest”— while his philistine parents, Victor and Astrid, visit an all-inclusive, ecologically insensitive resort in Cancun.
Since you asked: Victor is a podiatrist, and Rose, his older sister, dropped out of Vassar to get him through high school after their parents died young of breast cancer and heart disease.
Also in the mix will be her Newfoundland, Walter (“Newfs, as you probably know, are nicknamed the nanny dog”) whose cavorting with Nathan inspires her to quote “The Winter’s Tale”: “They’re like twinned lambs that did frisk i’ the sun. And bleat the one at th’ other!”
Rose is, no pun intended with the yogurt thing — though puns in this book are very much intended — a creature of high culture. Her home décor is vivid and varied (Louis XV sofa; Alexander Girard figurines; Bitossi vases). She paints Nathan’s room in a special Farrow & Ballesque shade of grayish white named Wevet (“means spiderweb in Dorset”).
When she has him pick a number between 1 and 10, it’s so she may choose a Mahler symphony to play him, quietly registering, for example, the “lugubrious tuba, glacial flutes, raging brass” of the Sixth.
She’s principled and voluble, sent into a literal tailspin when trashy pop like Starship’s “We Built This City” comes on the car radio. On the topic of aunts, while eating pancakes Rose rails against the persistence of Jemima on the syrup bottle. This must be before 2021, when it was changed to the Pearl Milling Company.
Indeed, Victor and Astrid have nicknamed her Aunt Rant.
And while she has the perhaps inevitable supportive gay best friend, a decade-younger man named Omar who runs Frogman, a diving shop in Skokie, “The Hitch” is blessedly free of any “My Best Friend’s Wedding”-ish desperate romantic angling. Rose will grow, but not by romancing or renouncing a man.
Among her many bête noirs — hugs; therapists; Nathan’s public school, where “against a brick wall girls lined up as if they expected to be shot”— is the corgi, the same type of dog favored by Queen Elizabeth II. Rose’s rant against this “dwarfish anatomical disaster” spills well over a page. “Corgis aren’t dogs,” she argues, “they’re just laughable cuddle toys with stubby legs and dopey eyes, bred to entertain the bourgeois dregs of humanity.”
Guess what kind of dog Walter will suddenly decide to attack at the dog park? And — here is when things take a few tangled spins around the maypole — guess who will be suddenly possessed by a corgi named Hazel while he’s under Rose’s supervision?
Yes, we are suddenly in“Cujo” territory, with the zany, unbothered tone of Mary Rodgers’s “Freaky Friday.” As Rose frets about how to exorcise the spirit of Hazel from Nathan’s small body before his parents return, while troubles mount at her yogurt company, “The Hitch,” generally brisk, does bog down a smidge.
The moral, if there is one, is that if rigid people won’t bend they might have bending forced upon them; the comic stakes hover somewhere around the goal posts in a middle-school lacrosse field. What is getting back to normal, anyway, when normal is so resolutely quirky?
But Levine, the author of “Treasure Island!!!” and “Short Dark Oracles,” is an unusual talent. Her commitment to boinging around the loopy little world she’s built is total. Only a killjoy would refuse to join her.
THE HITCH | By Sara Levine | Roxane Gay Books | 304 pp. | $27
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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