Eviction, displacement, and late-stage capitalism make for a dark, fun surreal fable
Dwelling | Emily Hunt Kivel | Farar, Straus and Giroux (320 pages)
In law school, my property professor started the first day of class with a famously provocative phrase: “property is theft.” It’s an anarchist slogan, meant to short-circuit the assumption that owning something is the most natural thing in the world. (At least, that’s my best reductive stab at explaining it.)
You hear it and go: okay, sure. But then you sit with it, and you start to notice. How much of life is structured around the idea that your existence doesn’t really work unless it comes with a deed or a lease.
Housing as a Legal Fiction: From Dickensian Evictions to Modern Absurdity
The illusion of shelter as a right is the animating force behind Emily Hunt Kivel’s brilliant and grimly funny novel Dwelling . It’s a book that reads like a nightmare yet it’s also charming, grounded and recognizable.
It is a powerful, surrealist fairy tale about a young woman’s quest for a home. Evie isn’t searching for a warm, fuzzy, “there’s-no-place-like-home” kind of home; she is literally in need of a place to live. And a community would be a bonus.
Kivel’s novel joins a long literary tradition in which property law is not just subtext but plot engine. In Pride and Prejudice, the legal entailment of an estate forces a family into the marriage market. Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables turns a stolen deed into a gothic inheritance curse.
Dickens, ever the evangelist for social justice, was perhaps the most explicit: The Old Curiosity Shop begins with an eviction. And in his magazine Household Words, he railed against housing conditions. He wrote of a “lodger world,” a society built not on ownership but tenancy — where people lived at the mercy of landlords, leases, and luck. Kivel picks up that thread and weaves it into the present.
Kivel’s novel, like those of her literary predecessors, reminds us that property is not just about a piece of land or a house; it’s a legal construct, a social agreement we all buy into. And a kind of a fairy tale that it would all work out for everyone.
The Fine Print of Eviction
The heart of plot is property and the devastating human consequences of its commodification. Much like Dickens, Kivel uses biting social commentary and satire to expose the grim realities of the poor housing conditions of our times. Kivel’s beautifully written novel offers a fantastic examination of housing insecurity and manages a wonderful trick: the book is both funny and tragic.
So, how does Kivel’s surreal world connect with our very real legal landscape? Dwelling crafts a terrifyingly close reality through a calculated series of legal and economic decisions that represent a true slippery slope. The mechanics of mass eviction are explained in a way that seems all too possible. The mayor, facing a shrinking budget, announced a deal with a leading vacation rental company, Aha!: Apartments and Homes Anywhere. (I told you the book was funny.)
Eviction restrictions were lifted. Rent regulations were overturned. There were incentives for landlords, grants for restoration, and an influx of federal funds. The actions had all been engineered to seem so gradual, Evie thought, so even banal. One subtle slight after another. Nothing shocking, per se. Looking back, Evie realized it had all led up to this exact moment.
This is where the book’s satire finds its sharpest edge. The antagonist isn’t a vaudevillian mustache-twirling villain or even a Dickensian caricature; it’s the legal and political frameworks that make the housing crisis possible. The book’s surreal landscape of evictions and decaying apartments isn’t a world without rules, but one where the rules — tax incentives, short-term rental policies — are designed to benefit only a few.
Evie is a graphic designer in New York City when renters are evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners behind. Parentless and without a safety net, Evie and her possessions are relocated to the basement of a vitamin shop — for one day only and at extortion prices. The clock is ticking.
A Realtor’s Last Dance
Evie flees to a new world in Texas, where she hopes to find refuge with an almost-cousin named Terry. Fortunately, she can work remotely (if not “work from home” since she is, after all, homeless). A bonus, in Evie’s calculations, is that Terry is a realtor. Maybe she can help her find a place.
Terry gives Evie refuge in her carriage house, but it isn’t a permanent solution. Soon, her cousin begins to show her available living spaces. Terry’s character is the last gasp of an antiquated real estate system, as the author shows the uselessness of her job in the new world order. Terry does her best to negotiate, scolding one manager for raising rents when so much of the country was unhoused and threatening to report him for code violations. Talk about an empty threat.
Yet Terry’s efforts are both admirable and futile as she leads Evie through a list of grim options: Tuff sheds, industrial cubes, and the back of a barbecue restaurant. One property featured women sitting in bathing suits next to a drained swimming pool.
This was the fifth place they’d seen that afternoon. Four of which Evie could not afford, and one of which wanted her to sign a seven-year lease with the guarantee that she would volunteer, on weekends, as part of the janitorial staff.
Satire or reality? In any event, Terry confesses she hasn’t had a rental listing in a quite a while. There just isn’t anything on the market. She tells Evie that at least it isn’t bad as New York. Evie replies, “Well. Not officially, anyway.”
Finding Solace in Footwear
Ultimately, Evie finds her way to a former repair shop shaped like a shoe. The nursery rhyme “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” evokes a chaotic image of overpopulation and frantic motherhood. But Kivel subverts this classic fairy tale with a modern, sharp irony. The protagonist’s move into a shoe isn’t a fall into destitution; it’s a surprising act of reclamation in a world where tiny, unaffordable city dwellings are mockingly called shoebox apartments.
At this point, the novel takes a more surreal turn, leaving its direct legal underpinnings behind. This creative shift works powerfully within the book. Kivel’s novel, which even includes a fleeting mention of ghosts, operates in a similar allegorical vein to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Just as Dickens used supernatural ghosts to expose Scrooge to the unseen consequences of his greed, Kivel uses a surreal, fable-like landscape to make visible the systemic forces of capitalism.
So. There is a lot more than property law going on here. but for the purposes of this blog, I will stick to legal themes. I’ll leave a broader analysis of the novel as a whole to well-rounded critics, such as this starred Publishers Weekly review.
Dwelling works so well because it takes a fantastical premise and grounds it in the very real, very human search for space, belonging, and, yes, justice. The novel’s final message isn’t about escaping the system, but about creating community and home on your own terms when the system has failed completely.
If you’ve ever looked at a rental listing and felt like you were being gaslit by reality, this book will make you feel seen.
Fine Print: Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the ARC