In Three Years with the Rat, an unnamed narrator moves into Toronto to meet up with his older sister Grace and her boyfriend John. Both Grace and John are scientists, and when the book begins, it’s been about a year since John disappeared and a bit longer than that since Grace disappeared. The narrator goes into their apartment to take their stuff and finds a mysterious, mirror-filled box, a lab rat named Buddy, and John’s notebook written in code. He sets off to investigate their disappearances and save his sister and friend, and what follows is a pretty trippy story about science and philosophy and time travel / alternate dimensions/realities. I don’t completely understand what happened, and I suspect that’s the author’s intention. The narrator’s girlfriend Nicole quotes Albert Camus, “I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world,” and that seems to be the point of this story.

Structured by the months of each particular year, the story flips us between the narrator’s early days in Toronto when he first learns of his sister’s work to Grace’s seemingly sudden decline into bouts of irrational anger to John’s own mood swings that appear to mirror Grace’s and finally to the present day when the narrator tries to piece it all together and must decide how far he is willing to go to save them. The Camus quote is a warning about the limitations of human intelligence, and in an early chapter, we see just how grand in scale Grace’s work aspires to be.

At one point, the narrator jokingly asks Grace to make the dumbed-down version of her work even dumber, and I admit I wanted to ask the same. So, per my understanding of the dumber version of the dumbed-down version of Grace’s work: she is interested in isolating pure subjectivity. Things and places around us are objective realities, in that an apple is red no matter who’s looking at it. But even though there are objective measures of time, our experience of time is very subjective, as it seems to speed up or slow down in relation to our needs. So how can we distil whatever it is that makes time different from everything else?

It’s a helluva project, and I feel like there are all these philosophical and metaphorical threads that Hoskings invites us to tease out and that I don’t quite grasp, but it also gives you an idea of how someone can lose themselves so thoroughly into that question that they, literally, disappear.Reading this is an unsettling experience, and deliberately so, I think. What starts out as a fairly straightforward missing person mystery somehow turns into a disquieting tale of things that aren’t quite right turns into a bit of a fantasy with a philosophical bent.

The end of the book left me with some lingering questions, and it’ll be easy to slip into an endless loop of questioning, possibly about things that are completely insignificant. (e.g. Does it mean anything that John’s lab passcode is the same as the ID badge number of the officer investigating Grace’s disappearance?) However, unlike Grace whose never ending thirst for knowledge consumes her, I think I’ll remain comfortable in the limitations of my own knowledge, and just remain glad that I read and enjoyed this twisty trippy tale.

As an aside, the author of this book is a neuroscientist who researches decision-making and the human brain, which I think is a pretty nerdy-awesome job for an author to have.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

When Michael sees his wife Nancy chatting with a stranger at a party, his intuition tells him this is the man she should have married. What follows is a rather melancholy glimpse into the breakdown of a family, as Michael befriends the man, John, and schemes to have his wife fall in love and marry him. A concurrent storyline involves Michael and Nancy’s daughter Ryan who senses the marital tension and distances herself from her family, whilst, as the book blurb puts it, she “goes through a period of sexual awakening.”

It’s an interesting premise — how tragic is it to feel that you just met the man you know your wife should have married? Yet on the flip side, how fucked up is it to try to manipulate her into falling in love with this man enough to leave you, instead of just talking to her straight out? I’d expected Michael to be a bit of a tragic figure and to an extent he is, but he is also really messed up, like a reverse Tom Ripley who is determined to ensure himself a miserable life.

I mostly felt bad for Nancy. At one point, she says that while other women fantasize about sex with handsome strangers, her fantasy is for her husband to make love to her. How sad is that? She does deserve a more loving, affectionate spouse, and so to that end, kudos to Michael, I guess, for trying to make it happen?

Despite the story being told in Michael’s voice, it’s really hard to get into his head because all I could think of was how he was messing up the lives of people around him. At one point, he lets John believe he wants to leave Nancy because he has a serious, likely fatal, illness. I’m just imagining how scary and horrific it feels to learn that a loved one, whether a spouse or a friend, is fatally ill, and I’m actually angry at him for putting them through that. He later writes Nancy that he’s “sick in more ways than you know” and while he may have some medical conditions, I think he’s referring to something else which has a long, unfortunate history of being pathologized, and so that just made me like him even less.

It took me a while to get into this story and I almost didn’t finish it, but I’m glad I did because the story comes together in the end. Some of the things that really annoyed me came at the end as well, but overall, the ending made sense. There’s a quiet intensity to Larsen’s writing that I think will draw some readers in and at least propelled me enough to finish the book. It’s the kind of book that I think readers will either love and praise for its “mesmerizing, unsparing quality” (back cover blurb from author Karen Russell), or dislike and possibly hate for probably the same reason, its intensely claustrophobic focus on a man who self-destructs and takes his family down with him.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

It must be a challenge to adapt Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew for a contemporary audience. Whereas Shakespeare’s audience presumably may have found Kate’s eventual capitulation comedic, today’s audiences may rightly point out the problem with a happy ending that features a woman submitting to a man.

The 90s movie 10 Things I Hate About You managed this well, I think, by blunting the force of Kat’s capitulation. While she still does succumb to a romance with Patrick, she does so only after he serenades her in style. (Still one of the best rom com grand gestures ever, and yes, clearly I have strong feelings about this too.)

In Vinegar Girl, Anne Tyler updates the Shakespeare classic in two ways: she blunts the force of Kate’s “shrew”-ishness by making her a modern woman dissatisfied with her life, and she provides a more contemporary rationale for Pyotr’s need to date her. I have mixed feelings about both, though overall I think she pulled them off well.

Despite the title, there is little acerbic about Kate’s character. She’s blunt, particularly when speaking with her students, but in a way that feels more thoughtless than pointed, and she’s more disgruntled and grouchy than acidic. To be fair, she had plenty of reason to be grouchy. She’s stuck with a job she’s not sure is right for her, and she’s also stuck parenting her vapid younger sister and clueless scientist father. It’s no wonder her many responsibilities and lack of progress make her frustrated.

Tyler adds an interesting twist to the need to pair Kate off. Rather than the dated idea of the older sister needing to marry before the younger sister can have her shot, Tyler adds in a subplot about US immigration. Pyotr is the best lab assistant Kate’s father has ever had, so when his visa is about to expire, Kate’s father is so desperate to keep him that he schemes to marry him off to Kate so he can get a green card.

This is one instance where I wish Tyler’s approach had a bit more of an edge. There are so many complicated issues around immigration that I had hoped for a bit more skewering of a system that can force people like Pyotr to feel they have no choice but to commit such a desperate act as marriage simply their livelihood. Alternatively, I had hoped for a bit of satire around Kate’s father’s sense of entitlement, and his blindness to his own privilege. He’s basically pimping his daughter out to keep a lab assistant, and not enough characters call him out for it. Also, when so many people are so desperate to immigrate to the US for a whole range of reasons, Kate’s father’s cavalier attitude towards the process and utter confidence he would succeed is beyond clueless, and I wish Tyler had delved more into that, possibly by delving deeper into Pyotr’s emotions. There is a scene where Pyotr talks about missing home, which is possibly the point where I most liked Pyotr, and I wish we’d seen more of that.

As well, putting that kind of pressure on Kate is kind of a dick move by her father, and his logic that she shouldn’t mind because she had no romantic prospects otherwise made me wish Kate had a bit more of Julia Stiles’ fire from 10 Things. I realize she eventually made a decision on her own terms, and to an extent, I’m gleeful at how she out-smarted her father in one very significant way, but overall, I felt kind of bad for her. Her actions felt more born out of hurt feelings than a victorious assertion of self, and I just wanted to look her father and her relatives in the eye and ask them what the hell they’re thinking, treating Kate that way.

A lot of my ambivalence about the ending, I think, is because Kate and Pyotr’s relationship felt oddly emotionally detached to me. Pyotr’s a bit of an opaque character so it’s hard to know how he feels about Kate — he says random things that for the most part seems pleasant and friendly at most, but shows more passion for home and the mice in the lab than for Kate. They barely seemed more than acquaintances throughout and any potential for marriage had all the passion of a roommate arrangement. In contrast, there seemed more chemistry with a cute co-worker that Kate had her eye on, and I only wish he had a bigger role. Where is the chemistry from 10 Things or even the fiery passion from the battle of wits in Shakespeare’s original?

All that being said, one spot where I’m glad for Tyler’s gentle hand is Kate’s final monologue, which in Shakespeare’s original, raises my hackles:

[…] dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.
It blots thy beauty[…]

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign[…]

I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
Whey they are bound to serve, love, and obey.

Taming of the Shrew, V.ii.2645-2670.

Tyler completely revamps this monologue into a treatise about the unfairness of gender roles and an acknowledgement of the pressures men feel to be stoic and strong. The speech felt a bit out of place within the novel, and Kate’s bringing it up felt a bit random, but I thought it struck a good balance between the level of capitulation Shakespeare’s original provided and a more modern sensibility around gender norms.

Overall, Vinegar Girl is a quick and light read. I’m not completely sure how I feel about it, but I enjoyed reading it.

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Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.