There was once, as we well know, an old woman who lived in a shoe.
Overwhelmed by poverty and an apparent lack of reproductive health care, Mother Goose tells us she lived a meager existence of uncertainty and scrappiness. As the physical realities of fabled characters, scrambling over each other to share a single mitten in the cold, feel comically and despairingly at hand, Emily Hunt Kivel’s debut novel, Dwelling, wonders what a young woman who lives in a shoe might do.
At first glance, Kivel’s surrealist take on the crumbling housing economy rings like a dystopian critique of our land-grabbing rat race and the increasingly alienated working conditions that fuel our individualist woes. Released August 5 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Dwelling is full of DeLillo-style, mundane-yet-astute observations that revel in the joys and perils of modern ridiculousness, lovingly poking fun at the precocious troupe that populates the Austin-based author and St. Edward’s University instructor’s too-real-to-be-true realm.
Protagonist Evie Cavallo begins her hero’s journey in New York under inauspicious circumstances. She works the kind of remote-friendly, marketing-centered job that demands neither talent nor work ethic – a notch, perhaps, above David Graeber’s bullshit jobs. An orphan perilously separated from her younger sister, Evie’s family situation is unique – though less so among the canon of adventurous main characters. Those distinctions aside, the web of loose, convenient acquaintances that constitute her social life feel familiar to many discussions about tech-driven loneliness in urban centers. Peeking between the lines of Kivel’s epigrammatic prose, however, is something with bigger teeth and stranger fur than critique or allegory.
When the governor of New York initiates a mass eviction, caustically dubbed the Revitalization, sweeping Evie out of her basement apartment and off to a distant cousin in Gulluck, Texas, she is shaken out of her status-quo acceptance. As small towns – fabled and otherwise – often are, Gulluck is more bizarre than it seems. Any Austinite would recognize its bucolic landscape of patchworked houses bubbling over with add-ons. The mythology secreting itself away in the Hill Country is familiar too, though delightfully warped to reflect the novelist’s contemporary sensibilities. In Texas, Evie finds her own distinctly shaped house and a life increasingly defined by its contours.
Evie’s path to a new dwelling is a winding one, meandering through real estate showings and soul searching that grows from realistic to outlandish. In the second half of the novel, the author’s mythic intentions snap into focus and Evie’s trajectory becomes a recognizable quest full of all the requirements: enchantment, prophecy, charmed guides, and villainous ghouls (a landlord, of course, in this case).
Readers still following the breadcrumbs of social critique laid out in the first half might find that they’ve crawled through the wardrobe into a George MacDonald story. The pace, from this point on, picks up to a trot: Characters bond quickly and conditions spiral, thrusting Evie through the rest of the story with occasionally superficial verdicts. Neither a postmodern epic nor a true work of fantasy, Kivel’s yarn does not belabor internalized character development or the tangled relationships that surface along the plot’s dirt trail. Instead, the story delights in worldly community amid an otherworldly cast and the joys of a justice-driven journey.
One of the subtler powers of the fairy tale is the way it simplifies the world around it, relishing in society’s redundancies and gently chiding us readers for skipping merrily through the ever-darkening woods. They often offer a word of caution or an alternate approach to a situation, but do not attempt to solve cultural issues, or examine their roots.
Evie’s expedition feels firmly rooted in that lineage. Unlike in the darkest of Grimmsian narratives, Kivel’s characters do not succumb to a morally loaded demise. Rather, they retreat from the ruinous world presented at the beginning of the novel – where we readers are still trapped – into the fanciful cosmos of their creator. With an air of Tom Robbins’ whimsy and a touch of Joy Williams’ psalms for the new world, Dwelling is lighthearted in its catastrophizing and non-prescriptive in its resolution. When the housing market gives you a shoe, make do.
Dwelling
by Emily Hunt Kivel
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
This article appears in August 8 • 2025.