The unnamed narrator of Alyssa Songsiridej’s debut, LITTLE RABBIT (242 pp., Bloomsbury, $26), is a 30-year-old novelist living in Somerville, Mass. She meets a choreographer two decades her senior at a residency in Maine, where she is focused diligently on finishing her own first book and where she finds the unnamed choreographer — the director of his own company — irritating, “dominating dinner with stories about his dance career.” But months later, when “Little Rabbit” begins, the choreographer comes to town from New York, and he emails her. They start having sex, which soon turns into consensual violence, the choreographer dominating and the protagonist submitting. That dynamic, in turn, morphs into a kind of love.
The arc in “Little Rabbit” could be described as a young woman slowly losing ownership of her body and sense of self; and yet also as her gaining ownership of her wants and desires, finding herself. During sex, the protagonist “felt both so empty and so full, hollowed out and ready to burst.” This contradiction forms the heart of this intense, erotically charged novel.
The only name we have for our narrator is Rabbit, the choreographer’s nickname for her from the residency (“she was always running off to work,” he says); the moniker anonymizes her, as though she is not fully a person. In bed, she says, “I wanted him to break me and dissolve the edges that kept me individual.”
“Little Rabbit” raises interesting questions about gender roles and relations. “How could I want a man to hurt me?” the protagonist asks her friend, who asks, “Would you feel different if you were doing this with a woman?” The novel forces us to consider whether her consent, her desire, justify the pain he inflicts on her. Rabbit is in an inherently vulnerable position: so much younger, smaller, less experienced, less wealthy than the choreographer. At 30, she is unsure of herself as both an artist and a person. Compared with her lover, she suspects she’s “not properly an adult.”
“Little Rabbit” is a worthy contemplation of sexual politics, revealing how losing and finding yourself do not have to be mutually exclusive.
At the start of Ashley Hutson’s joyfully weird novel, ONE’S COMPANY (257 pp., Norton, paperback, $16.95), Bonnie — a 36-year-old convenience store employee living in a trailer in an unspecified town in America — wins the lottery. She uses her “indecent amount of money” to purchase land on a remote mountaintop two hours from her trailer, where she’ll replicate the world of her favorite TV show, “Three’s Company.” She plans to live out the lives of each character through every episode of all eight seasons, again and again “until the years ran out.” By burying herself in this fiction, Bonnie seeks to erase her real identity and the world around her, to unburden herself of her past and future. “Time was happening, surely,” she says, “but not to me.”
In this replica, Bonnie wants to reflect the illogic of the “Three’s Company” set: “Rooms that were mentioned but never seen, and other rooms that were left mysterious as to whether they existed at all,” are as important to her as the rooms (in the trio’s apartment, in their landlords’ and friends’) where the main action takes place. Structurally, “One’s Company” tells its story in fragments, out of order. Gradually Hutson fills in a timeline of Bonnie’s brutal past as a victim of violent crime, and we learn bit by bit why Bonnie wants so badly to isolate herself in her imagination — why the world outside her brain, outside the TV screen, is so terrifying for her.
Like many sitcoms, this novel balances lightness, humor and love with moments of darkness and even horror, when we glimpse the extent of Bonnie’s obsessions and vulnerabilities. We worry for the protagonist even as we sometimes fear her.
While addressing the ways trauma can undo a life, destabilize and even obliterate it, this novel can also come across as broadly relatable. Bonnie yearns to “breach the seam between sick reality and my favorite fiction, step through and sew up the hole behind me.” Who among us has never longed to escape into a TV show, a movie, a written story, to live in it at least temporarily? “One’s Company,” delightfully odd and beautifully written, is a pleasure to read.
In 1999 on Chicago’s South Side, 12-year-old Fe Fe lives in the Robert Taylor Homes, the now-demolished public housing project where Toya Wolfe, the author of LAST SUMMER ON STATE STREET (212 pp., Morrow, $27.99), also grew up. Fe Fe has three close friends, Precious, Stacia and Tonya, who play double Dutch with her in their “drug- and gang-infested neighborhood,” until one summer, “one by one, they dropped out of sight.”
This is a story of children who live in the projects having to become adults too early. Fe Fe narrates how it feels to be born right on the edges of society, and to be abandoned by it. The buildings’ 16-story walls, with their iron gates “running the length of each floor,” are like divisions between abundance and poverty, opportunity and lack thereof.
As Fe Fe’s friends drop out of childhood as if they were dropping out of a game of jump-rope, so too does her 16-year-old brother, Meechie. One night he is choked in his bedroom by the police during a random, routine sweep of their neighborhood, and thrown in jail. He is innocent of any wrongdoing, but “he was Black and a boy, and to the police, that fit the description of a criminal.” At the precinct with her Mama, Fe Fe stares at the cops and thinks, “This behavior, bursting into someone’s home and dragging them away, is how lynchings were conducted.” She thinks about how her ancestors, “Grandma’s brothers and uncles, left the house in this same way, some never found, others found swinging from trees or in pieces in a river.” After a few hours they bring Meechie home, but the damage has been done: He has lost hope. Soon he is in a gang, dealing drugs, leaving home for the streets.
Wolfe shows us Fe Fe’s still-tender, childlike mind: the schoolgirl self-consciousness, how “when I needed a hug, I’d get lost in the pillow of Mama’s stomach.” And yet, she recognizes that as a Black child, she is denied a claim on innocence: “From the moment we are born, some people start a clock on how long it’ll take the boys to commit a crime, the girls to seduce.”
This is a powerful novel about injustice, the institutional racism that is the foundation of the projects and their policing, and survival. “Maybe the worst part about growing up in public housing is that people think your body is public too,” Fe Fe says. “That even before you are born, your Black body already belongs to the owners of the land.” Tragic, hopeful, brimming with love, Wolfe’s debut is a remarkable achievement.
Claire Kohda is the author of “Woman, Eating.”
June 25, 2022 at 02:09AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/books/review/little-rabbit-alyssa-songsiridej-ones-company-ashley-hutson-last-summer-on-state-street-toya-wolfe.html
Review: ‘Little Rabbit,’ by Alyssa Songsiridej; ‘One’s Company,’ by Ashley Hutson; ‘Last Summer on State Street,’ by Toya Wolfe - The New York Times
https://news.google.com/search?q=little&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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