Birth. “Something breaking, coming loose, then the pain of it.” A small, bent and wrinkled creature has recovered from that pain. But then, instead of the long-awaited cry of a newborn baby: silence.
This is the backdrop to Anna Goldreich’s highly accomplished, quietly devastating debut novel The Leverette, a book that asks us to see late-term abortion as a form of felt death for many mothers. Since this miscarriage six months ago, Claire has felt that everyone, including her partner Phoebe, is eagerly expecting her to move on with her life. But she remains haunted by the loss, stuck waiting for that first scream.
In a drastic attempt at change, the couple move to a cottage in the rural village where Phoebe grew up. Phoebe is busy helping her farmer parents raise lambs, while Claire sits at home day after day, unable to eat. For the first time during pregnancy, Claire developed herself as a real person with a physical body – not just a “floating head” as she thought of herself. The growing child’s strong physicality had made him more aware of himself. Now she finds herself feeling unreal again – until she finds an abandoned baby rabbit under the hedge.
Goldrich writes of this scene as a second birth, full of the vibrant life that the first life lacked. Claire reaches through the bramble thorns, “And through the pain, through the tearing, there is tenderness. My hand on the head, fingers outstretched on the back… pulling her up from the bushes, though I’ve opened space for her, bringing her out to meet me.” Like the dead baby she patted in the hospital, Claire finds herself licking the rabbit’s face clean with her tongue, and feels pulled back to life.
It’s an extraordinary scene, written with absolute conviction, and from this point on Goldreich succeeds in making the moments between Claire and the baby, whom she names Isla, deeply touching, even as they become more disturbing. Goldreich sets out three possibilities for the reader at once: the rabbit as a symptom of mental illness; The rabbit as a desperate but unnaturally sensible attempt at self-healing on Claire’s part; Rabbits as a means of accessing the ultimate truth that we are all beings who need contact with the earth. For several weeks, Leverett sleeps in Claire’s arms and is carried around in a sling. Isla then goes wild, and Claire is under the illusion that these are merely rebellious actions, trapping the rabbit in a domesticity she cannot survive as she tracks Isla’s changing height on the door frame and talks about her mother as Isla’s “grandmother”.
Leverett is a modest book in some ways. Goldreich attempts to make it polyphonic by alternating Claire and Phoebe’s chapters, but Phoebe’s voice sections don’t fly. There is a suggestion that Phoebe does not share the kind of linguistic fluency with which Claire thinks – that she cannot really think verbally at all. This presents the kind of literary challenge that many writers have grappled with; Phoebe’s love for Claire is all the more impressive as it is expressed intermittently, but the frequent line breaks in these sections feel a little uncertain. Still, Goldrich is surprisingly good at bringing the original abortion and Claire’s relationship with the rabbit to visceral life that it’s ultimately a winning debut novel. The need for new models of our relationship with nature inspires much writing today, and Goldreich’s approach here is mischievous and elegantly devoid of dogma.
Ultimately, it is up to Phoebe to claim Claire back for human love. It is unclear in the book whether Claire saves Rabbit’s life or destroys his chances; But Isla has restored to Claire some of the physical realities that motherhood promised, and it may be that the failure of the project with Isla is part of that. In a moment of climax, Phoebe releases “from the depths of some poor creature a strange cry, a hoarse voice, tearing the air”, making it still possible to have a dynamic feeling of the mammalian physicality in love between Claire and Phoebe.
