6. Bunny

 By Mona Awad

This Goodreads review took the words outta my mouth: 

Words cannot, and I mean CANNOT, express how disappointed I am with this novel. I went from, "wow, this is so creepy, I love it!" to "well, that was a little disappointing," to "FUCK THIS SHIT SO FUCKING HARD." 

Now why would I waste precious time reviewing a book that I could not WAIT to finish?  The problem was that I’d already written most of my review before I found Rereader’s :-(

What initially intrigued me about Bunny was a simple blurb:  Heathers meets The Craft meets Frankenstein, and Goodreads reviews saying what a slip-streamy mind-fuck of a book it was.  Author Mona Awad grew up in Montreal so when I saw a copy of Bunny at SW Welch, I didn’t hesitate getting it, then promptly reading it.. Obvs I missed Marg Atwood praising Bunny as "genius" at the top of the book cover, which should've been a warning bell: Ding-ding!! Over-hype alert!! 

Bunny started off intriguingly enough, with the academic setting reminding me of another novel about a poor student of promising talent attending a prestigious program within a fictional Ivy League university.  This self-loathing outsider longed to be part of a clique who happened to be a secret society where its members performed arcane rituals involving animal sacrifice. That novel was The Secret History by Donna Tartt, a work so infinitely superior than Bunny that it may have ruined my expectations of similar works of academia fiction!

Bunny features Samantha Mackie (aka Smackie), who’s already into her second year of an elite creative writing program. She's part of a workshop comprised only of her and four other women who're already in a tight-knit circle of their own.  The workshop is led by the rather clueless professor Ursula Radcliffe aka KareKare aka Fosco, who can't help but fawn over the four privileged "girls". Even though these girls all have unique names of their own, they endearingly call each other Bunny (hence the Heathers reference). Samantha hates/fears/envies the Bunnies and christens them with her own secret nicknames: Caroline/Cupcake, Victoria/Creepy Doll, Kira/Vignette and their leader Eleanor/Duchess.  But really, all Samantha wants is to be one of them. 

Awad makes it easy to hate the Bunnies: they talk in a sickeningly cutesy way, constantly cooing over each other, etc.  Awad gets so caught up in showing us how annoying and superficial they are, she forgets to make them remotely interesting or distinctive (other than Cupcake, they’re hard to tell apart).  Finally the Bunnies invite Samantha to one of their secret "Smut Salons".  At first it seems like they just drink grossly sweet cocktails and talk about boys, but no, somehow these girls have figured out a way to conjure up bunny-boys!  There’s no explanation on how they discovered this magical ability.  Even Evil Dead and Buffy provided some background on how supernatural entities can be brought about, but Awad doesn’t bother with this.  

Samantha’s one true friend Ava is the “rebel punk” cuz her hair is bleached out and disheveled, and she wears a lot of mesh and dark eye shadow.  Ava dropped out of art school because she couldn’t deal with the phoniness and wants nothing to do with the status quo.  Ava is Awad’s spin on Holden Caulfield.  But Samantha doesn't want to be a cool, rebel chick like Ava, she wants to be a rich bitch Bunny who wears heels and girlie dresses with poodle prints.

So yeah, the Bunnies have the ability to conjure up cute, empty-headed young "men" out of wild rabbits that populate their forested neighbourhood, but these boy-men are far from perfect.  They wear gloves as their hands are not fully formed.  Sometimes there’s a hairlip, they’re easily startled and may start screaming if you ask them too many questions about themselves.  Their heads exploding seems like an attempt at dark comedy, but it just made me wonder how the girls would clean up the mess, which Awad never goes into.  But the most important thing that’s missing from these creatures is their manhood.  They’re like emasculated changelings.  The Bunnies don't even call them boys, but use words like Hybrid or Draft.  That's why they finally recruit Samantha into their Smut Salon - with her "rougher background" she may conjure up a hybrid with more substance, and maybe even some proper appendages.

Except this plot device took forever to get somewhere.  I kept thinking when was the plot going to advance to the next level, or step outside of Samantha’s navel gazing?  What are the ethical ramifications of the wealthy elite transforming bunnies into human beings as playthings, and then disposing them or letting them roam free?  When the Bunnies literally axe down the failed experiments, how do they clean up all that blood and gore from their beautiful homes?

There was a scene where Samantha encountered a failed experiment at Prof Radcliffe's Yule gathering - a bunny-boy was part of the hired catering staff.  There could’ve been some potential ethical dilemma to explore, or something cleverly comedic.  Instead, Awad avoided any sociological insight and kept rehashing Samantha’s issues throughout the entire novel.  Some examples:

• Samantha’s secret shame regarding her father’s failed business ventures.  
• When they had money, she had a taste of the good life, and when it was all gone, it sowed her obsession with the Bunny clique, and what her life could’ve been if she was fabulously rich like them.
• Her love-hate relationship with the Bunnies. 
• Her constant guilt about abandoning her one true friend Ava, or constantly fearing that she’s lost her.
• Her crippling writer’s block, because she’s so preoccupied with her status at Warren.

As Rereader wrote so succinctly in Goodreads:

All Samantha did for LITERALLY 3/4 OF THE BOOK was whine, whine, whine about her life and how she hates people but can't tell them, and LIES, LIES LIES. Holy shit, did she tell the fucking truth AT ALL in this story? I couldn't tell because the author was SO ADAMANT about making her lie about FUCKING EVERYTHING that I honestly couldn't tell. I was so done with her self-created and self-attended pity parties that by the time she actually did something it didn't feel satisfying.

Unlike The Secret History, where every sentence had its place, the writing in Bunny was a mixed bag.  Rereader and I both agree that Awad has a talent for descriptive prose, but the pacing and narrative structure left a lot to be desired.  The writing got so bogged down with repetitive details of Smackie’s same old shit, it got tiresome pretty fast, and I found myself skimming over the “pity party” sections, to coin Rereader’s term. Here's a sample:

Kill me now, Ava would say. She would feel no shameful tugs of longing to wear their camel coats (boring). To don their fur-lined gloves, their knitted hats (I'd rather be fucking cold). No awful itch in her mesh fingers to steal their soft purses. To slip into their creamy skins and live there. To lie in their just-right princess beds with the clean white loud sheets and dream their bland dreams. To be welcomed through their pillar-flanked doors by their Wonder Bread mothers and fathers. Who are alive. Who are not in debt. Who are not hiding in the mountains of Mexico among the emaciated dogs and the sunbaked dust. Who are not wanted for fraud or corruption.

The paragraph in itself is fine and says a lot in a paragraph, but imagine reading variations of this over and over again every other chapter.  

Finally, in Chapter 30 (out of 38), something happened - there was a twist!  One of the men Samantha conjured up - Max - had become Ava’s lover, and had also insinuated himself into the Bunny circle, causing instant rifts and jealousies.  Max was the ultimate female fantasy, he had fully formed hands and not only was he utterly sexy, he had a fully functioning penis!   What was Samantha’s secret?? (Don’t use hare-brained rabbits - try a stag!). And then, even later, we realized Samantha was more pathetic and messed up than we could have ever thought possible... we learn that Ava was unknowingly conjured up by Samantha - from a swan, when Samantha was all torn up about a drunken fling with a writing professor from the previous semester.  

All of this, including a confrontation with Samantha and Max vs the Bunnies, was rushed to a conclusion that could’ve been pretty good had the rest of the narrative been set up in more capable hands.  Other goodreads reviewers were saying things like, WTF did I just read, or how odd or weird this book was, but having grown up with Angela Carter, the fantastical/fairy tale elements weren’t really that bizarre.  Even though I didn't feel angry like Rereads after finally finishing Bunny, I was still  hugely disappointed - Bunny had all the right ingredients to be a really great read, but ended up being somewhat clever yet not very funny, unevenly entertaining, and not terribly enjoyable.

Book 13 – The Secret History

By Donna Tartt

I unwittingly read two back-to-back similar sounding books: outsider freshman in isolated American liberal arts college ends up in unusual class led by unorthodox, charismatic professor.

But this is where the similarities end.

The Cheese Monkeys is light, funny and satirical. The Secret History is the equivalent of a modern Greek tragedy in collegiate proportions. The main character, Richard Pepin, finally able to escape his small town roots in California, starts a new life in a New England college. With some previous background in Greek, he discovers a class taught by a distinguished classics scholar who accepts only a limited number of students. When another professor informs him that Julian Morrow conducts his selection on a personal rather than academic basis, and that he and his students have virtually no contact with the rest of the campus, Richard is intrigued.

How Richard gradually ingratiates himself with the professor and the classics clique is well executed and really sucked me into the narrative. At first, he observes the oddly anachronistic students from afar. There’s Henry, who is quiet, unassuming and always in a suit; Charles and Camilla, who like to dress in white; Francis, who’s a bit of a dandy, and lastly, Bunny, an affable freeloader. The early stages of friendship are just awkward enough to make it realistic and compelling enough to make it interesting. Like Richard, getting to know these people is like getting sucked into another time and place outside of “asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture”. You want to know more about these characters, and what happens next.

Richard’s first day in Julian’s class, in the inner sanctum, is also excellently described. Julian’s exquisite taste has transformed a drab office into a philosopher’s library, and Richard realizes why his students are so devoted as “ he was a marvelous talker, a magical talker.” The discussion that day also sets the tone for the rest of the novel: Plato’s four divine madnesses, the burden of self, why people want to lose the self in the first place, and the powerful mystery of the Dionysiac ritual. That seductive desire to become absolutely free, to attain that “fire of pure being”, if only for a fleeting moment.

Sure enough, the clique holds an unusual secret. But we only see it through the perspective of Richard, the newcomer, who is liked but not yet fully accepted into the circle. As the reader, you really don’t know what’s going on, everything seems opaque. Let’s just say the fragile harmony of the group is thrown off when they embark on their own customized Dionysiac clusterfuck, and things go downhill from there. One of the clique undergoes psychological change from familiar friend to cutting, vindictive tormentor and this has deadly ramifications for the entire group.

The novel also has an unusual structure, where you’re informed at the beginning that one of the main characters is murdered, and Richard reflects back on what happened. The mystery isn’t about who killed whom. This doesn’t interest Tartt, so much as using the framing of the Greek tragedy to explore the darkness that lurks in human nature. What makes reasonably intelligent people latch onto to each other and succumb to the pack instinct? What forces or catalytic factors propel otherwise civilized people into barbaric murderers?

There was also good sociological insight into the relationship between the individuals in the clique against the rest of the students at the isolated liberal arts college. One of the main reasons The Secret History was given to Olman when it first came out was that the setting was so much like Reed.

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmostphere made it a thriving black Petri dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke.

The Secret History was published in 1992, and the setting was of that period in time, but I kept picturing the story taking place much earlier in the century, like the 1920’s or 30’s. The style of writing, the way the professors and students spoke with each other and behaved, their strangely anachronistic lifestyle. The only people that seemed contemporary were the students outside of that clique. But this is the only part where I could find fault in Tartt’s writing. She excels in her classic style of writing and philosophical discourse, but slangy urban banter sounds somewhat forced and stilted. But I guess it’d be hard to write in slang when topics of conversation tend to be about arguing how far apart the soldiers in a Roman legion had stood, or whether Hesiod’s primordial Chaos was simply empty space or chaos in the modern sense of the word!

So this novel had just about everything. Sociological insight. Manipulation, paranoia and psychological tension. Some police/FBI investigation thrown in. The familiar tragic ingredients of love, sacrifice, betrayal. And just a tiny bit of the supernatural to seriously creep you out. Tartt confidently weaves all these together, making for a marvelously satisfying read. The story is rich, dense, complex and apparently took 10 non-continuous years to write. This is indeed a beautiful and terrifying book. I would definitely be interested in reading Tartt’s next book, The Little Friend.