We call them Bunnies because that's what they call each other. Seriously. Bunny.
Example:
Hi, Bunny!
Hi, Bunny!
What did you do last night, Bunny?
I hung out with you, Bunny. Remember, Bunny?
That's right, Bunny, you hung out with me and it was the best time I ever had.
Bunny, I love you.
I love you, Bunny.
And then they hug each other so hard I think their chests are going to implode. I would even secretly hope for it from where I sat, stood, leaned, in the opposite corner of the lecture hall, department lounge, auditorium, bearing witness to four grown women – my academic peers – cooingly strangle each other hello. Or good-bye. Or just because you're so amazing Bunny.
I really liked Mona Awad's Bunny – it's sardonically funny, but with very sad underpinnings (like Eileen or Martin John; two other books I loved for the same reason) – and it goes to some unreal extremes to explore loneliness, outsiderness, and the ways in which women can choose to support or destroy one another. It does have a Mean Girls in the Ivy League vibe, but layered on top of that are dark and twisted fairy tales come to life – which works so well. When I read Awad's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, I wished it had more literary oomph; this is the novel I was looking for. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
As Bunny begins, Samantha Mackey is starting the second year of her MFA program at the prestigious Warren University; the only full scholarship student among her all-female cohort. These other women are from very rich families, they clique together and dress like juveniles, and they all write aggressively feminist fiction with mythical twists. (The leader of the pack, whom Samantha has nicknamed Duchess, writes inscrutable “proems” on glass sheets with the dagger-shaped diamond she wears around her neck; the other Bunnies and their workshop advisor – whom Samantha has nicknamed Fosco – lap it up while Samantha rolls her eyes.) After suffering a year of her cohort giving unhelpful criticism during Workshop – accusing Samantha of writing gritty outsider fiction for its own sake – she finds herself suffering writer's block just as she is supposed to be using these last two semesters to polish up her thesis. I don't always love books about writers (especially books about struggling to finish an MFA), but Bunny delightfully skewers the premise:
They all watch me walk toward the stage at the center of the room, where they're all seated as though they're in a play. In what Fosco likes to call the “Hermeneutic Circle”, aka a “Safe Space” in which to bravely bare our souls to one another in the form of cryptic word art. Evoke our alchemical experiences and experiments. “In which our work will perform the Body and the Body will perform our work.”Whatever that means. Even after a year at Warren, I'm still not totally sure.Meanwhile, Samantha has spent the summer hanging out with her new friend, Ava – a snarky freewheeling artist who backs up Samantha's unflattering estimations of her program and the Bunnies – but when the Bunnies make gestures to include Samantha in their circle, Samantha is inextricably drawn to them; even if it imperils her relationship with Ava. After attending their “Smut Salon” and participating in their off-campus “Workshop”, Samantha will be shown what “performing the Body” really means.
Bunny is ironically self-aware: Samantha internally critcises the Bunnies for writing about mythological lovers, and the Bunnies vocally criticise Samantha for writing outsider fiction, and yet Bunny is an outsider story that darkly references myths and fairy tales. I don't know what “the work performing the body” means either, but I especially loved Awad's metaphors about the body: When he looks at me, I feel my rib cage open like a pair of French doors. Everything that keeps me alive suddenly bared and there for the taking. Or: I want to scream. But I just sit there. My smile is fixed on my face, nailed there, though it jerks under the pins. And this is definitely feminist writing – so many of the metaphors are about the female body: Fosco looks at her class “in her probing, intensely gynecological way”. There is a pause “so pregnant it delivers, consumes its own spawn, then grows big with child again”. Ava explains about the Bunnies: “These cultish girls...tried to eat her soul like a placenta”. From the intriguing line-by-line writing, to the surprising and insightful narrative, and the art that Awad employs to bring it all together, I loved everything about Bunny.
