In her debut novel Dwelling, Austin writer Emily Hunt Kivel takes on America’s housing shortage by confining the crisis within the phantasmagoric folds of a fairy tale.
When Evie Cavallo, a graphic designer in her twenties, is evicted from her New York apartment, she attempts to ask her boss Gregory for a raise, only to learn that not only is an increase in salary out of the question but her boss is as homeless as she is.
“This isn’t just happening to you,” says Gregory, who spills his strife over the loss of his rent-controlled apartment, and the impossibility of maneuvering a moving van through streets thronged by the recently evicted. “Chaos. Chaos! And I’ve got the dogs to take care of.”
Emily Hunt Kivel’s “Dwelling” is due out Aug. 5. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
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As a result of the mayor’s scheme to increase tourism by rendering all apartments into high-end vacation rentals, New Yorkers are now squatting in storage units, reconciling with exes for floor space and moving back in with Mom and Dad.
With her parents dead and her only sister in a mental institution, Evie makes a desperate trip to a Texas town called Gulluck, hoping to seek shelter with a distant cousin she does not know. This relative, named Terry Lang, happens to be a real estate agent and is sympathetic to her plight. He sets Evie up in a carriage house before securing a more stable space for her in the form of a boot-shaped building that was a shoe repair shop before becoming a honky-tonk.
While attempting to work remotely, Evie’s world soon goes from weird to wondrous. Terry’s son Andrew invites her to observe a humanoid fish-creature that sleeps in what the locals call “Lake Unknown.” She falls in love with a mysterious locksmith who employs psychic skills to create skeleton keys. And after deciding to become the town’s shoe doctor, Evie discovers she possesses a supernatural talent for crafting footwear, and that her seemingly random move to Gulluck might be the fulfillment of an ancient podal prophecy.
Stylistically, Kivel’s fable finds its contemporary footing in culturally critical asides regarding vitamin shops and two-year colleges that recall the deadpan surrealism of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, while the dreamlike logic of her prose pays happy homage to the spiritual fantasies of George MacDonald.
Dwelling — a novel that introduces its readers to a cabal of immortal cobblers and a talking bear trying to fathom the protagonist’s veganism — is a book of miracles masked by the mundane, an entertaining antidote to urban ennui that doubles as a survival guide for souls refusing to surrender to the superficiality of their surroundings.
Dwelling
By Emily Hunt Kivel
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $28; due out Aug. 5)
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