The affordable housing crisis is bad. But it could get even worse.
That’s the future Emily Hunt Kivel imagines in her debut novel, “Dwelling,” out this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book follows Evie, a graphic designer living in a near-future New York in which the city leaders have partnered with a vacation-rental company: “Eviction restrictions were lifted. Rent regulations were overturned. There were incentives for landlords, grants for restoration, an influx of federal funds.”
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As a result, Evie — along with most of the city’s other renters — have been rendered homeless. Evie can’t move in with her sister, who lives in a psychiatric facility in Colorado. So she contacts her late mother’s cousin, who lives in the fictional town of Gulluck, Texas, and moves down to the Panhandle.
Evie meets some friendly faces — Andrew, her cousin’s anxiety-ridden son, and Bertie, an odd keymaker — but can’t escape the feeling that something’s not quite right about Gulluck. That feeling intensifies when she finally finds a place of her own — a 20-foot-tall cement boot. After being visited constantly by people who assume she’s a cobbler, she decides to take shoemaking classes and receives an invitation to join a secretive society.
Then things get really weird. “Dwelling” is a fairy tale, and its ending is one that readers likely won’t see coming.
Kivel answered questions about “Dwelling” from Austin, Texas, where she lives. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: What was the genesis for this novel?
I wrote it on the heels of a period where I had essentially moved across the country four times within the span of four years. It was a time of instability and a lot of rumination on home and where to go and where to stay. I think a lot of people in our generation have experienced that. So I was thinking about home a lot, and I had been renting everywhere, but most recently in New York, and I had some pretty horrendous experiences — some good ones, too — with landlords. Even the best ones remind you that your house is not actually yours.
And then I was thinking about the nursery rhyme about the old woman in the shoe, as one does, and about how funny a visual that is. I kept thinking, “Why is she in the shoe and how does she feel about it? Is she angry? Is she delighted? Is she ecstatic?” I thought, “Well, I bet she doesn’t really want to be there, but has to be for some reason. And that, to me, had a lot of narrative legs.
Q: What was the process like of inventing the town of Gulluck?
Gulluck, to me, is a sort of Texas of the mind. It’s deeply fictional. You’re not going to go to the Panhandle and find a town that Gulluck is based on. I was really inspired by the mystery of Texas in general, but also that area specifically, and how there was this mysteriousness hidden in plain sight. To me, that’s so inspiring. The process of writing “Dwelling” was me writing my way into actually feeling like I belonged in Texas, which I did not feel upon arriving here. I’m by no means the voice of Texan literature, but I do think that there is this interesting feeling of being an outsider here that can be very alienating, but can also be really inspiring if you let it be.
Q: The book has vivid and sometimes unsettling descriptions of houses and buildings. What was the process of designing those various spaces like?
I really love interiors, and I’m very sensitive to being in a physical space that I find inspiring, but I’m also deeply suspicious of architecture. I have a hard time accepting it as just a pure art form because it’s so tied to land value. There’s something very interesting and very full of tension about the house as an art form to me. I was playing with these houses as a place for imagination, and so I wasn’t really basing any of the interior spaces on real places, but I was letting my imagination build them in my own mind. It was kind of similar to that scene where Evie is building a shoe in her mind when she’s in bed. I feel like that’s a lot of how the physical objects and spaces and dwelling came to me. There was an architecture, but it was purely imaginative.
Q: How did you come up with the concept of houses with constant additions being made all the time?
I was interested in what I was already seeing. In Austin, you see people who maybe have bought a house, but can’t afford to move. They’re pretty much stuck in their starter home, which is, I think, true of a lot of millennials. If they were ever able to buy a house, they are pretty much stuck there. So you have to shape it to your life as it grows. I was seeing that happen in my neighborhood and all over Austin, and I was interested in that as a concept because usually it does not make pretty houses. Sometimes it makes a banal, uninspired house, sometimes it makes a monstrosity, and sometimes it makes something really interesting. So I think with the add-ons, I was taking that concept and amplifying it and extending it as far as it could go, to the point that everyone’s living in these strange makeshift castles.
Q: There’s a scene where Bertie shows Evie around town, telling her what different buildings used to be. Does the concept of buildings as almost living, changing things interest you?
I’ve lived in L.A., New York, and Austin, which are some of the most expensive cities. I am so interested in the history of buildings and the way they are repurposed, and the way that their histories can be both reimagined and degraded. I think you see both happening simultaneously, and it’s the result of people not having enough space, and of people not really respecting the sacredness of certain spaces. I don’t know if they necessarily should, but I do see it. So I am interested in, “This store actually used to be a slaughterhouse, and it’s succulents now.” I’m actually thinking of a specific place in Austin when I say that. I do think that there’s a kind of humor and deranged quality to that. I think it’s a derangement that is deeply human, because we’re just continuing to live upon each other’s weird histories and build upon them, and we don’t really have a say in what happened before.
Q: Evie develops a kind of bond with Andrew. What is it about him that she finds so compelling? Is it a shared sense of anxiety?
I think there is. Evie’s interesting because sometimes she’s very clueless, but sometimes, with Andrew, she sees that she is kind of an embodiment of his fear, and there’s something kind of tender and heartbreaking about it. What she sees in him is a boy, a young man who’s a very strange character. There’s something funny about him. There’s something prematurely jaded about him, and she understands why. I teach, and I see that in some of my students as well, a fatalistic quality in them that gives them the impression of being quite mature, even though they’re children. Andrew is full of fear in some ways. He’s very noble, but in other ways, he’s very paralyzed with fear. I think that living in fear is so toxic, but also so common, especially right now, when people seem so uncertain of their future.
Evie and Andrew are full of fear of different things, but I do think that there’s an interconnectedness between all of it, and it’s a deep alienation. It’s an alienation from each other, from our homes, from our work, and I think he feels that, and he’s an interesting, although endearing, slightly remote character. It’s funny, I have found that the readers I’ve had connect with him, which I was not expecting.
Emily Hunt Kivel in conversation with Chelsea Kirk
When: 7 p.m., Aug. 20
Where: Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles
Info: https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-emily-hunt-kivel-presents-dwelling-w-chelsea-kirk