1 week Ago
“Rabbit Moon,” like novelist Jennifer Haigh’s bristling body of prior work, plunges us into gritty, real-world conditions and issues. Its voice — brisk, capable, almost reportorial — also functions as a high-speed camera, zooming into Shanghai, “miracle city of modern China, on a Sunday morning just before dawn,” its abandoned financial district “a ghostly proscenium studded with skyscrapers.” There, Lindsey Litvak, a beautiful 22-year-old redhead paused at an empty street corner, is struck by a car, its anonymous male driver “nineteen and full of rice wine.
” Lindsey is rendered comatose. “Rabbit Moon” by Jennifer Haigh. Little, Brown, 277 pages.
$29 The pages that follow, tacking back and forth in time and between points of view, investigate exactly how Lindsey arrived at that fateful moment, and how the terrible accident affects key people in her orbit. This structure faintly echoes that of Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge at San Luis Rey,” in which a remote Peruvian bridge’s collapse inspires a priest to research the lives of individuals lost in that accident. (Full disclosure: I could never finish Wilder’s book.
I ripped hungrily through “Rabbit Moon.”) Haigh’s narrative resembles a police procedural — one that prowls widely to disclose backstories and contexts. Its foremost strength, and Haigh’s steadiest skill, is to fully inhabit disparate minds, hopscotching among genders, ages, economic classes and cultures.
The main players are Grace, Lindsey’s young, adopted Chinese sister, a credulous, energetic girl parked in a New Hampshire summer camp at the time of the hit-and-run, kept unaware of her big sister’s condition for as long as possible; Lindsey’s Boston-based, divorced parents, Claire (a failed writer) and Aaron (a business tycoon), who fly into Shanghai immediately after the disaster; and Jun, or Johnny, a gay hairdresser who is Lindsey’s best buddy and lurks like a ghostly witness at the edges of her story. Shanghai itself, though, vast and looming, may be the novel’s most vivid character. We’re often dropped straight into its hot, humid streets and air-conditioned, blanched interiors.
Haigh apparently lived and wrote there for months, and she’s returned with a fierce, up-close tour. “Outside, rush-hour traffic is in full swing — three lanes in each direction, cars idling bumper to bumper. The volume of pedestrians is staggering.
Chinese of all ages on their way somewhere. ..
. At the busy intersection they stand shoulder to shoulder, close enough to smell one another — perfume and mouthwash, cigarettes and garlic.” In the grocery store, “a smell of fish and spoiling produce, the lush stink of overripe fruit” and “a vast selection of dried mushrooms, a hundred varieties of dehydrated noodle soup in bright paper bowls.
Officious employees stand in every aisle, watching for shoplifters. ..
. At nine o’clock in the morning, the heat is already sickening.” For Lindsey, the place gives relief: “In Shanghai she felt unburdened.
” The city, “aggressively modern, seemed to have been built yesterday ...
young and vibrant, refreshingly indifferent to its own history — a bracing antidote to her educational New England childhood, where every other building was the birthplace of some Whig or Federalist she’d never heard of.” Shanghai “was a city for getting on with her life.” By contrast, the widowed property manager in Lindsey’s Shanghai apartment building grew up there and experiences the city very differently, as “dangerous, polluted, crowded, expensive,” a place where “he can afford nothing” and “can barely breathe.
” Against this seething backdrop we ingest the principals’ prickly dramas. Lindsey and her choices (from teaching in a Beijing language school to working for a Shanghai escort service) are drawn with intense care. We believe her past sexual trauma; her distaste for her parents; her stumbling through mundane and ill-fated hookups; her earnest love for her adopted little sister.
Likewise, Haigh’s parental portraits ring true. Claire is a chronically unfulfilled divorcée who secretly longs for spiritual consolation. Once in Shanghai, she suffers double alienation outside the Chinese language, “the deepest kind of loneliness.
” Aaron is a recognizably impatient, bottom-line-fixated, all-business alpha. When he meets Claire for breakfast after Lindsey’s accident, “it’s as though the wreckage of their marriage has been swept into a pile in the middle of the breakfast table ..
. a neat hillock of radioactive waste.” Young Grace’s innocence, which blooms into mature compassion, acts as a gentle balm.
Keeping these and other stories (including highly specific, interpersonal resentments) in the air, and making readers care all the way through a shocking late plot development is a serious feat. Yet what — one is finally bound to ask — defines a novel’s heart? “Rabbit Moon” seems most insistently interested in how people talk to themselves about what has happened to them: Here are some of the stories we tell ourselves about ways we carry on. If the adaptive responses of certain characters to what befalls them feel somewhat idealized – a kind of ad hoc dusting of mercy — “Rabbit Moon” remains impressive for its scope, ambition, vibrant characters and its unsettlingly graphic, resonant story.
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