{"id":8848,"date":"2025-08-19T07:31:23","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T07:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/8848\/"},"modified":"2025-08-19T07:31:23","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T07:31:23","slug":"a-brooklyn-renters-odyssey-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/8848\/","title":{"rendered":"A Brooklyn Renter\u2019s Odyssey | The New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

Evie Cavallo is a young woman who lives in a shoe. To be specific, she rents a twenty-foot-tall cowboy-boot-shaped building, with an industrial-grade kitchen and deteriorating bistro chairs. She has to inform confused visitors, repeatedly, that this is her home. What is this doing to her psychologically, Evie wonders. Also: could it be true? \u201cDwelling<\/a>,\u201d Emily Hunt Kivel\u2019s kooky, endearing fairy tale of a d\u00e9but novel, is interested in the wobbly line between what\u2019s real and what\u2019s not, and in the way that saying things can make them so.<\/p>\n

Evie\u2019s hero\u2019s journey begins, as so many do, with a problem that spurs her to action: she, along with every other renter in New York City, is being evicted to make way for vacation homes, in a surreal, class-stratifying upheaval reminiscent of the pandemic lockdowns. Entitled, somewhat resourceful, and lightly employed, Evie assumes she will figure something out. She disdains her neighbors\u2019 plan to become Tenants in Common with six others. \u201cThey\u2019d share one sock,\u201d Evie thinks, later telling herself \u201cthere was no way\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0she was sharing a sock.\u201d Others make plans to move near family. Evie, though, has no such option. Both of her parents have died, and her sister, Elena, lives in a hippie psychiatric institution in Colorado. So Evie makes her way to Gulluck, Texas, to impose on a distant cousin she has never met. She has no desire to leave Brooklyn, or to see the rest of the country. \u201cI\u2019ll be back,\u201d she tells her landlord\u2019s portly, benevolent son Obed when leaving New York. \u201cI live here.\u201d She can work her graphic-design job remotely in the meantime.<\/p>\n

In Texas, a baffled Evie becomes alert to her surroundings: she notices that what seem to be windows are actually paintings of windows; she observes that a group of passersby appeared, at first, to be a painting of pedestrians. \u201cGulluck,\u201d she thinks, \u201cmade no sense.\u201d But, like any fairy-tale heroine, she swiftly finds helpers. Her cousin, a real-estate agent, assists her in locating the boot. Her new boyfriend, Bertie, a good-natured key-maker who is either enchanted or just seems that way to Evie because she\u2019s falling in love with him, orients her in her new home. A sage adolescent cousin tells her: \u201cYou live here now.\u201d But when Evie learns that Elena\u2019s institution is teetering toward the cultish, she embarks on a journey to rescue her\u2014a mission she seems unequipped to carry out. \u201cShe would get her sister,\u201d Kivel writes, with characteristic understatement, \u201cwhatever that entailed.\u201d<\/p>\n

That the evictions are under way on page 1 of the book means that Kivel spends little time on the mundanities of Evie\u2019s life in Brooklyn. In a sense, she\u2019s a familiar type of literary protagonist: she lives alone, has few friends, and works an unfulfilling computer job. But Kivel\u2019s is not a novel interested in reflecting the ennui of everyday life through descriptions that replicate a character\u2019s boredom. Instead, it places its subject in novel situations, and allows her to learn and do things. Things can happen, even to uninspired women in New York, Kivel suggests. When Evie gets kicked out of her apartment, following a series of menacing incremental shifts in housing policy, she gains awareness of herself as a character in a larger narrative; she realizes that \u201cit had all led up to this exact moment, this tragicomic climax.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first, the book\u2019s canny political observations come up against Evie\u2019s na\u00efvet\u00e9. Our protagonist is \u201cintelligent, basically, but not very perceptive,\u201d we learn, someone who \u201cwasn\u2019t used to thinking through anything more than once.\u201d In the city, the narrator adroitly reports the texture of the world\u2014the inexplicable ass spanks and wayward heads of lettuce and Cheerio-munching rats\u2014while Evie lurches around, a whimsical and slightly daffy playing monologue in her head: \u201cSometimes Evie imagined the land, the world, the city around her as a cartoon neighborhood, the houses\u2019 edges elastic like balloons.\u201d As she progresses on her path to self-knowledge, she starts to see more clearly, though Kivel makes the world around her all the more strange.<\/p>\n

Kivel\u2019s narration remains droll and nonchalant, practically taunting the reader, as Evie\u2019s circumstances become more and more absurd. An eviction happened? Yep. And her new house is a boot? O.K. And a lion with \u201cridiculous buck teeth like those in a ventriloquist dummy\u201d crosses her path? These things happen. Various side characters have a similarly unfazed air: telling Evie she may fulfill a prophecy, a new mentor in Gulluck adds, \u201cno pressure at all.\u201d Kivel keeps things moving, with a style that is frank, descriptive, and dry. \u201cAll of a sudden she had a house. That house was a shoe,\u201d she writes. \u201cThe next chapter happened in a whirlwind, the way many next chapters of many stories do.\u201d If the first pages of the book suggest the immovability of the status quo, Kivel intervenes by rendering a world in which the rules can change at any moment.<\/p>\n

Much of Evie\u2019s new understanding, of herself and of her environment, originates from those around her, especially her new boyfriend. \u201cYou\u2019re a kind of hero,\u201d Bertie tells her. \u201cWe\u2019re both heroes.\u201d And it is Bertie who helps her unlock a sense of agency, by encouraging her to take up a new vocation, as a cobbler. Evie, who at the start of the book is in the camp of idle, underemployed protagonists that stud much of contemporary fiction, begins to find meaning in her work. Her graphic-design job\u2014a gig that placed her in \u201ca league of sullen, pretty women who\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0cultivated their eyebrows and earrings\u201d\u2014had mostly involved \u201cchoosing typefaces and superimposing them onto photographs taken by someone else.\u201d Her approach to shoemaking, in contrast, is sensual and responsive, rendered in lush, winding sentences that mimic the objects\u2019 well-honed contours. In one early creation, Kivel writes:<\/p>\n

\n

The heel, a simple block she\u2019d carved with waves, like the ripples on Lake Unknown, was stitched in a tight black thread to the matte red leather counter, which led seamlessly into the quarter\u2014\u00adthe section that covered the inside middle of the foot, the softest and most vulnerable part.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Evie\u2019s shoemaking teacher soon tells her that she is ready to leave class and go out on her own, seemingly a wish-fulfilling analogue of the M.F.A. classroom. (Kivel has an M.F.A., and has taught creative writing.) One wonders if the book\u2019s faith in the redemptive power of craft, and the limits of the classroom, echoes the novelist\u2019s own philosophy.<\/p>\n

To Kivel\u2019s credit, these passages on the ardor of creation are some of the only parts of the book that seem based on a writer\u2019s life. \u201cDwelling\u201d is squarely focussed on what could happen in a world that is deeply, invigoratingly made up. Allusions to myths, fables, and riffs on common idioms abound, many of them evocative and quite funny. The sky over Gulluck recalls an illustrated children\u2019s Bible. Evie\u2019s old boss, sending his spaniels to safety in a helicopter, holds them up as if he were \u201can unwavering Abraham with two miniature Isaacs.\u201d Some of these flourishes feel a touch gratuitous: milk is spilled; repeated Amelia Bedelia-esque references are made to Evie\u2019s sister losing her marbles; and, of course, there\u2019s the name\u2014yes, this Eve bites into an apple. The allusions can seem ornamental, but they also remind us that Evie\u2019s world is much like our own, only stranger: the same old stories repeat themselves, just not in the way you\u2019d expect.<\/p>\n

\u201cDwelling\u201d is among a crop of novels this year about lonely young women who channel their disaffection into long, unusual quests. Sophie Kemp\u2019s d\u00e9but novel, \u201cParadise Logic<\/a>,\u201d narrated in a deranged, headlong style, spends its prologue teeing up a prophecy (foretold \u201cfrom the moment she was bornth\u201d), before sending its protagonist, a jarringly jejune twenty-three-year-old Brooklynite named Reality, on a journey to become \u201cthe greatest girlfriend of all time\u201d to a loser grad student named Ariel. (Along the way, she\u2019s helped by obscure drugs, energy drinks, and interventions from talking animals and weird girls.) In Brittany Newell\u2019s \u201cSoft Core<\/a>,\u201d a San Francisco ghost story of sorts, a sex worker named Ruth goes on a journey to find her missing ex-boyfriend. Though not explicitly fantastical, there is a layer of the surreal\u2014or is it just paranoia and hallucination that make Ruth think she sees him at the bus stop, on sidewalks, in the club? In these books, young women are constrained by the demands of femininity, yet they embrace the full range of tactics\u2014and antics\u2014at their disposal to gain a sense of control. They live in their bodies; they spend little time on their phones. Even as their worlds are distorted, they adapt.<\/p>\n

In \u201cDwelling,\u201d Kivel cribs the plot conventions of fairy tales, and their strident moral logic, too. \u201cThe state of housing across the country was a point of national pride or a catastrophic embarrassment, depending on whom you asked,\u201d the narrator intones, early on. She threads explicit commentary on the housing crisis through the book: Elena becomes imperilled after a condo developer buys the land that houses her institution; a teen-age cousin journals about his fears that he may never afford to leave his parents\u2019 home in Gulluck. True to fairy-tale tropes, Evie\u2019s landlord, Edita, has an exterior that conveys her hideous character, with long fingernails and steam erupting from her ears. When Evie returns to the old apartment, Edita taunts her with memories of her pathetic past as a Brooklyn renter: \u201cWhat a lonely, lonely girl. She has no friends, she has no family, she doesn\u2019t do anything, nothing, just goes to work and back again.\u201d<\/p>\n

It should come as no surprise that Evie gets a happy ending after all this\u2014that after completing several feats of bravery, with the help of her new friends, she returns safely to the boot. One might detect a trace of pessimism in Kivel\u2019s social critique here, in the implication that finding all of this\u2014a rich community, a fulfilling vocation, an affordable place to live\u2014is the stuff of fantasy. (Or at least requires leaving New York.) Evie leans on a bit of magic, it\u2019s true, but what she actually gains from her adventure is far more modest: sincerity, dedication, openness to the world. She goes from dismissing the shared sock to living in a shoe with almost everyone she knows.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Evie Cavallo is a young woman who lives in a shoe. To be specific, she rents a twenty-foot-tall…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8849,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[266],"tags":[359,8765,8766,18,117,8764,8767,19,17,4097,2461],"class_list":{"0":"post-8848","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-brooklyn","10":"tag-cobblers","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-fairy-tales","14":"tag-graphic-designers","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-renting","18":"tag-texas"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}