Rail: This book is extremely funny—laughs on every page. But it’s also illuminating about human nature and the need for connection and the sense of belonging. One of the most moving moments for me came when Rose asked herself, “When was the last time I felt something as fragile and filamentary as hope?” Why did you want to create such a hopeless narrator?
Levine: Every culture needs stories that uplift and remind us of our best human qualities. But we also need stories that acknowledge the dark or shadowy side. When you feel hopeless, it’s easy to feel alone. Everyone else appears to be basking in the sun.
Rose has been down a long time. And she’s made a bad habit of being outraged. It’s dismaying how outrage seems to drive so many conversations right now. Not just online. It’s pretty easy to go out to dinner with friends and find “community” by blasting whatever upsetting thing has been going on. But that doesn’t feel to me like deep connection. It’s us against them—and can leave you feeling empty.
When I was writing The Hitch, I was thinking about how Rose’s superiority complex feeds her sense of separateness. Her win/lose attitude, her focus on success in the outer world, her need to always win the argument—maybe these qualities helped her when she was young and trying to establish herself. But now they’re more of a hindrance. She doesn’t need to fight for her survival. She needs to eat, as Mary Munn would say, a Happy Meal.
Rail: Another chilling moment is when Rose observes:
You don’t realize how small your life has become until something wreaks havoc, until the pin is removed on which the threads of reality hang. I had friends besides Omar, but suddenly they seemed more like friend-proxies: people I socialized with in the dairy industry, acquaintances with whom I occasionally had coffee or lunch.
Rose’s loneliness seems in some ways exceptional, but in others pretty common. How do so many people get so lonely and how can they get less so?
Levine: Robert Putnam wrote a book in 2000 called Bowling Alone in which he argued Americans had lost trust in our institutions. We weren’t getting out there and joining things. We were becoming a nation of loners. In 2023 the (former) Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an epidemic. We’re politically polarized; we’re still reeling from the pandemic; people are addicted to social media. None of this is news. I’ll tell you what has been my experience as a teacher. I teach three-hour seminars at the Art Institute of Chicago. My graduate students, on the class break, pick up their phones rather than turn and talk to the person next to them. They didn’t used to do that. Post-pandemic, undergrads ask if they can do advising appointments by email, because they’re too anxious to meet me in person. It seems like people are losing their social skills, assuming they ever had them.
That said, I recently went to a winter solstice party and was very moved to see a key rack in the hosts’ kitchen—they had maybe eight sets of house keys, belonging to friends. The invitation to the party began, “Gorgeous people: Let’s have some fire, soup, and fellowship to kick off the longest night!” They invited guests to “bring something meaningful to burn” and built a bonfire on the beach. I won’t divulge what people burned, but it was beautiful. Then we all went back to their place to eat and drink. I felt about two hundred percent happier after attending that party. But now I’ve got to figure out the rest of the year!
It’s a hard thing to navigate if, like me, you’re an introvert and a writer. I thrive on solitude but I know I need connection. I think everyone needs community, but you have to be creative about how you get it. You can’t expect one group of people to fulfill all your needs. But you need to connect to other people, and you probably need to play a useful role in somebody’s life besides your own.
Rail: Hazel the corgi quotes Shakespeare all the time—how come?
Levine: Because Shakespeare is amazing and his body of work belongs to the world, but some people exploit him as cultural capital. For example, when Rose watches her puppy play with Nathan, she throws out an allusion to The Winter’s Tale. I see that beat as a flex. She’s quoting the play to exclude Astrid; she knows her sister-in-law doesn’t know the play. Then Hazel comes along, this corgi spirit who is a trickster figure. She loves messing with Rose and teasing her with Shakespeare. She uses Shakespeare to signal that she is there; Nathan doesn’t know a line. But Rose misses the randomness of Hazel’s quotations. She thinks she’s in a revenge tragedy and is going to be punished. She hears a bit of Macbeth and imagines the ghost is out to get her.
Rail: Same question on the knock-knock jokes—why does Hazel ask so many and how did you come up with them? My favorite is the one that goes “‘Knock knock.’ ‘Who’s there?’ ‘Toucan.’ ‘Toucan who?’ ‘Toucan share one body!’”
Levine: I’m glad the knock-knock jokes passed muster. I’m not a natural at those. I stole what I could and invented the rest. Hazel asks knock-knock jokes because she tunes into Nathan’s taste. Unlike Rose who wants Nathan to grow up fast and embrace her taste. (Hence, the Mahler invitation: “Pick a number, any number.”) I wanted to contrast Rose’s hierarchical worldview with that of the corgi who’s enlightened enough to enjoy everything. Rose calls knock-knock jokes “the cheapest form of wit,” which is pretty harsh. But the other reason Hazel asks so many knock knock jokes is because the book is about boundaries. Rose has terrible boundaries. She enters without knocking, so to speak. And Hazel is playfully trying to teach her to knock first.
Rail: Did you have to spend a lot of time on occult message boards and websites researching soul possession or were you already well-versed? Did you find anything in your research that was especially weird and great but that you were not able to use?
Levine: Yes, I owe a debt to subreddits and anyone who spoke online, sincerely, about being possessed by demons or about being gifted enough to remove them. I didn’t know anything about soul possession when I started the novel. I bought a bunch of books which I read on the Metra in brown paper wrappers. Especially useful were William J. Baldwin’s Healing Lost Souls: Releasing Unwanted Spirits from Your Energy Body, and Edith Fiore’s The Unquiet Dead: A Psychologist Treats Spirit Possession. I didn’t find anyone, anywhere, claiming to be possessed by an animal spirit. But I read several useful books by Penelope Smith who is a “pioneer in the field of interspecies telepathic communication.” Smith talks to animals, whether they are alive or dead, and I wish I could have used more of her stories. Initially Rose consulted an animal psychic, trying to get a better read on Walter’s feelings about having killed a corgi. But I ended up cutting the scene.
Rail: Rose is an Olympic athlete of judgmental behavior and self-satisfied scolding. At one point, a friend casually uses the phrase “mother lode” and Rose thinks (but uncharacteristically refrains from saying out loud) that “Not everyone’s mother is a rich gold vein, let alone a source of desirable qualities.” At another point, she wonders, “Who even wears earmuffs anymore?” The range of her complaints is precise and ridiculous—how did you select which peeves she would have and are any of them yours?
Levine: Story rules. How does the peeve serve the story? I had a bit about the Queen of England and how she poured gravy into her corgis’ bowls and gave them awful names like Dookie, Honey, and Sugar. I did, for me, a considerable bit of research so Rose could rant about the royal corgis and make it seem like being anti-corgi was being pro-democracy. But in the end, the story didn’t need that rant.
Some of the peeves are mine, some of them belong to people I love, some of them are entirely fictional. I’ll only say this: I have no beef with earmuffs.
Rail: You have Rose reflect that Albert Einstein said “the most important decision you make is whether you believe we live in a friendly or a hostile universe.” I like how we see Rose’s answer to this question evolve. What kind of universe do you believe in?
Levine: I believe in a friendly universe. But I didn’t consider the possibility until I was well past forty.
Rail: What books did you read as inspiration for this one?
Horacio Castellanos Moya’s The She-Devil in the Mirror and Barbara Pym’s The Sweet Dove Died. Specifically for the exorcist plot, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Sara Gran’s Come Closer and Paul Tremblay’s Head Full of Ghosts. Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black was in the back of my mind, and John Wyndham’s Chocky was in the front. Vladimir Nabokov and Jane Austen are my literary parents, though I don’t know if anyone would see a family resemblance.
Rail: And what books have you read recently that you highly recommend?
Levine: All of Lucy Prebble’s plays, Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Karel Capek’s War with the Newts, Dana A. Williams’s Toni at Random, and Robert Liddell’s Elizabeth and Ivy.
Rail: What’s next?
Levine: I’m working on a novel that is behaving like the lovechild of P.G. Wodehouse and Mary McCarthy’s The Group. Please wish me luck!