People who research anything, who deep-dive anything, understand that solitude is never loneliness when you have your subject. The subject looms before you like a bright city on the horizon, beckoning you forward. And you’re forever living in it, or going toward it.
One’s Company sounded like an absurdist premise — a young woman who wins the largest ever lottery prize in the US decides to bring to life the full-sized set from her favourite TV show, Three’s Company (including the apartment building, the Regal Beagle pub, Janet’s flower shop, etc.), and live out the rest of her days there — and while there is some dark and ironic humour along the way, this is in reality a thoughtful and touching examination of trauma, identity, and mental illness. Debut novelist Ashley Hutson poses a really intriguing question at the heart of this book (should a person be free to escape her demons by entering a fantasy world that doesn’t hurt anyone else or does society have a duty to bring her back to face the world that hurt her?), and the narrative arc that she creates to answer this question made for a totally satisfying read. I hope this singular read finds a wide audience; I will look for Hutson again. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
All in all I wanted to touch the fabrics, to eat the ice cream, to feel the same afternoon sunlight a model kicking up her heels in a seventies-era Sears autumn catalog was selling. The humming safety of a packaged life. I wanted to experience a whole other timeline. Through Three’s Company I would transcend the existence of Bonnie Lincoln. Time itself would no longer be an enemy. The filth of my own life would cease to be a threat.
We learn on the first page that Bonnie has won an immense fortune, and within the first chapter, learn of her plans to build the world as seen on Three’s Company in some remote location. Her backstory is revealed in tandem with the present day action and we become privy to various hurts and losses that awkward young Bonnie has endured over the years, and about an eighth of the way in, we learn of a major trauma she suffered more recently and how discovering and bingeing Three’s Company pretty much saved her life. There’s much made of fantasy and obsession and self-erasure, and what at first seemed like a kitschy nostalgia for a time that Bonnie (and the author) were not alive for, eventually becomes a piercing meditation on our own era of disconnection. Who wouldn’t want to live in a seemingly simpler time with wise-cracking roomies and all your troubles resolved in a half hour story arc? A few favourite quotes:
• After I won the lottery, a lot of strangers showed up to tell me what a piece of trash I was. Then they would ask me for money.
• Love was a sickness. It had poisoned me. People lie when they say misery or loneliness kills; it’s love. Love is the lethal agent. The more you have to live for, the more can be taken away.
• Other people can ruin a dream just by knowing it.
• Three’s Company was a farce, after all. Farce punishes everyone eventually.
Not quite an unreliable narrator, we believe Bonnie when she tells us not to chalk her new life up to mental illness (only nihilism and rage), but the longer she lives in the world of Three’s Company, the less healthy she seems. Perhaps punishment is inevitable for those who embrace farce.
I had possessed all of the things that a traditionally good life were conditional upon. I was functionally human. Why, then, had that life always felt like a pastime, just something I was doing while waiting for my other self, the actualized, better version of myself, to come along and make it real?
One’s Company has a vibe very similar to My Year of Rest and Relaxation — and perhaps for that reason this could resonate even more strongly with readers younger than I am: someone who was alive and watching Three’s Company in its initial airing — and like Ottessa Moshfegh, Ashley Hutson has a distinctive voice and much of interest to say. I was provoked and touched and intrigued throughout this and want to end by noting that I think Hutson nailed the final scenes.
