DWELLING

Displaced by mass evictions in New York City, a young woman searches for a new home in the fairy-tale town of Gulluck, Texas.

Evie Cavallo is out on the streets. After having lived much of her life in New York, Evie—along with most other renters, restaurants, and small businesses—has been evicted in the final stage of the mayor’s revitalization program, which repealed eviction restrictions, ended rental regulations, and will turn over the newly vacant real estate to Aha!, “the world’s leading vacation rental company,” to add to its fleet of properties. Caught largely unawares, the city is in chaos and Evie, whose parents are dead and whose only sister is institutionalized in a facility for the criminally insane in Colorado, is left clutching at straws. Her desperation leads her to Gulluck, Texas, where her second cousin, Terry Lang, lives in a sprawling suburban compound with her husband and four children. Terry, a diminutive but ferocious real estate agent, helps Evie get back on her feet and even finds her a place to rent, no mean feat in Gulluck’s depressed market. The only caveat: The house is literally a giant cement boot, consistently invaded by potential customers seeking the cobbler who used to work there. Meanwhile, something is wrong at the institution where Evie’s sister lives, and in the center of Gulluck a giant, sleepy secret slowly blinks. Spritely and yet saturated with longing, Hunt Kivel’s prose draws the reader into a world that is somehow just like and also much more than the world we recognize around us, effecting a subtle destabilization on the reader that becomes more discomfiting as Gulluck’s weirdness increases. The book’s mild dissonance when incorporating some of its more literal fairy-tale fare is outweighed by its lovingly depicted characters and its astute critique of the surreal condition late-stage capitalism bequeaths to us all.

This accomplished debut is a fairy-tale mirror held up to our too-real lives.