LITTLE RABBIT

A 30-year-old writer begins a fraught sexual relationship with a 51-year-old choreographer.

The unnamed narrator of Songsiridej’s debut attends a dance performance choreographed by a much older man—also unnamed—whom she meets at a residency. Afterward, at dinner, he orders a gin martini, and somehow that does the trick. “I knew, right then, that I would sleep with him.” Why? It’s unclear. For a dedicated writer, up at 5 a.m. every day to write before her administrative job, the narrator has a surprisingly limited vocabulary. In the onslaught of sex scenes and seductions that ensue, she fails to summon the specificity that might convince a reader of their chemistry. Instead, strange word choices (“I…made gutted animal sounds”), frequent clichés (“More, my body called, harder”), and awkward phrasing (“I froze as if with fright, but fright mixed with a pulse”) all make for a confusing and uncomfortable read. In the merciful intermissions between the sex scenes, the narrator ruminates—with equal vagueness—on her sexual submissiveness with an older, wealthier man and her loosening ties with the queer community. Her relationship with her roommate and supposed friend, Annie, is deteriorating, though given how jealous, controlling, and astonishingly naïve Annie is (“You stayed at his apartment,” she says to the narrator. “A stranger?”), one can’t help but think their relationship is better off dead. “I knew what Annie wanted,” the narrator thinks, “a narrative, a pattern of elegantly spaced beats between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ to vindicate both my attitude then and how I felt about the choreographer now.” As it happens, the reader might want some of these things, too, and in the end, this novel fails to deliver them.

An exploration of sexual dynamics that is too vague to illuminate or provoke.