THE HITCH

When a corgi’s soul inhabits a little boy, several spiritual journeys are set in motion.

“I don’t feel well,” Rose Cutler tells her 6-year-old nephew, Nathan, midway through Levine’s latest. “I need either silence or a conversation that requires no depth of attention.” It’s Rose in a nutshell: brutal, blunt, and hilarious in a way that leaves you doing spit-takes. When Nathan’s parents announce they’re off on a trip to Cancún, Rose convinces her brother, Victor (Nathan’s dad), that she can care for him while they’re away (Nathan soon admits to Rose that, in his family, she’s referred to as “Aunt Rant,” so, as the reader can plainly see, various tensions are at play here). Rose couldn’t have predicted that her dog would start the week by killing a small corgi in front of Nathan—nor that Nathan would become convinced, despite Rose’s many counterarguments, that the corgi’s soul had then flown into his own body, melding with his own soul. In fact, as Rose soon observes, Nathan even begins to resemble Hazel (the corgi’s name, as it turns out)—her “huge head and black-rimmed prostitute eyes”—if only for brief moments. Levine manages this subject matter with the skill of a tightrope walker. Somehow—impossibly—the novel is simultaneously absurd and deeply moving, wise and absolutely, side-splittingly uproarious. It is a book about relationships more than it is one about metaphysics or new-age healers: Rose’s relationships with Nathan, with her brother and sister-in-law, with her put-upon best friend, Omar. Whimsy aside, Rose’s growth is particularly convincing in a way that resists trite epiphany, and the ending, when it arrives, feels deeply earned—but the journey it takes to get there isn’t one anyone could have predicted.

A novel that seems destined to become a cult classic.