Emily Hunt Kivel’s debut novel, Dwelling, is a formally inventive and singular exploration of one woman’s quest for home. Set in a not particularly difficult to imagine future, the novel begins as Evie, a 29 year old graphic designer is evicted from her apartment. New York City’s mayor has struck a deal with a vacation rental company and provided incentives for buildings and landlords to evict tenants while steadily rolling back protections for renters: “The actions had all been engineered to seem so gradual, Evie thought, even banal. One subtle slight after another. Nothing shocking, per se.” This process of capitalism taking over the city is gradual, and then sudden. Evie finds herself on the street with many other New Yorkers now finding themselves without a home. As Evie describes it, “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?”
So where to go from here? Evie’s parents are deceased, and her only sister has been institutionalized, and the only family she can think of is an aunt that lives in Gulluck, Texas. So Evie sets off for Gulluck, leaving behind most of her possessions with her landlord, and arrives at the home of her aunt, a real estate agent, and her husband and many children. Evie’s aunt helps her find one of the only available houses in the area, a building shaped like a giant cowboy boot that’s been vacant for years. And so Evie sets herself up in this shoe house in a tiny town in Texas, and realizing that working virtually as a part-time graphic designer isn’t her calling, she begins taking lessons at the local college in cobbling. She quickly masters the art of cobbling and shows an immense amount of faculty and creativity at constructing shoes. What follows in a fairytale-like journey full of bewitching and magical characters who assist Evie in her quest.
The novel is an incisive and relevant narrative about our current moment and economic anxieties, but its also a lyric tale full of wonder. Kivel is able to straddle this line so well, and as she describes in an interview with NPR, “fairy tales and folk tales always reflect the anxieties of their day. And so in that way, this certainly is a fairytale of late-stage capitalism, you know? It’s a quest of one woman who’s been made to feel valueless in her society, right? She has this kind of very removed work life. She has a living situation that she has no control over…And so I think with Evie, there’s this kind of – there’s an adventure that stems from a very deep collective anxiety that we’re all experiencing, and I do believe that within that, that is a folk tale.”
Dwelling is a novel that’s deeply grounded in issues of class, capitalism, and community. It grapples with the power of what it means to create and produce things that help people get to where they’re going, feel more comfortable, or even feel more confident in their appearance. But its not just about shoes, its about a woman seizing the opportunity to own her creative process and regain a modicum of power over hew own circumstance—which feels really hopeful in this moment of increasingly terrifying authoritarianism and economic unrest. I can’t recommend this novel highly enough, it really is a testament to the form and what it can accomplish.