There Was a Young Woman Who Lived in a Shoe

New York Times

3 days ago

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.
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