RABBITS FOR FOOD

By Binnie Kirshenbaum

The first half of “Rabbits for Food,” Binnie Kirshenbaum’s seventh novel, chronicles a
breakdown. The second half deals with the resultant stay in a mental hospital. “The Bell
Jar” was divided this way too, and the balance is wrong. Plath jettisoned the beguiling
wit of her opening chapters for a more crumpled account of what can happen post-
breakdown. Philip Roth made a similar mistake in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” retreating
from the heights of hilarity into all that Monkey business. (He too involves shrinks.) The
problem is, you’re combining two different books. Plath and Roth got away with it, more
or less, but it’s a tricky artistic model.

Bunny, a sometime novelist with a penchant for put-downs, a glutinous approach to

cats, and a hypersensitivity to the color brown, has settled into severe depression. She
traces it back to various deaths (a cat, a friend, a grandfather) and the “six seamless
years of immaculate misery” we all face during adolescence. But Bunny is far from
experiencing any camaraderie of common suffering. Her depression folds her inward
and keeps everyone at bay. She’s convinced people don’t like her. Some do fear her;
some fear for her; others just dread her causing a scene. Her zoologist husband, Albie, is
patient and loyal as can be — while seeing an undemanding Englishwoman on the side.

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of May. See the full list. ]

Bunny cries a lot and can hardly eat, sleep or articulate a need. (Except for cigarettes.
She must be one of the last smokers in New York.) She doesn’t shower or change her
underwear. She forgets to drink her coffee. Her favorite foods taste rotten. Her current
cat annoys her. She has to lie about voting for Obama in 2008, since she couldn’t get out
of bed. She still manages to make it to the “loo,” though, as Albie’s girlfriend cattily
points out.

While telling herself she’s not suicidal, Bunny eventually indulges in a symbolic self-
obliteration, destroying documents attesting to her existence and identity: passport,
bank statements, family photos. And it is an indulgence, a greedy bid for power. She’s
not someone who should ever be let loose near a shredder.

Kirshenbaum doesn’t trivialize mental breakdown. She makes Bunny’s debilitation raw
and worrying, and not without its insights. Despite unnecessary repetitions and
overexplication, along with odd jumps in chronology, the story initially moves right
along in anticipation of some 2008 New Year’s Eve festivities: Bunny and Albie are
supposed to meet friends at a chic Asian restaurant, then go on to the Frankenhoffs’
after-party. The Frankenhoffs live in an apartment near enough Times Square that you
can see the ball drop, and so much is made of the Frankenhoffs’ after-party that the
novel begins to sound like “The Age of Innocence,” with a touch of Bernhard’s
“Woodcutters.” But without the wing chair.
Bunny and Albie aren’t really in the party mood. Albie’s nervous about taking his fragile,
erratic, malicious, malodorous wife out in public, and Bunny thinks Auld Lang Syne
“sentimentalizes friendship with an excessive sweetness that is something like the
grotesquerie of baby chicks dyed pink for Easter.” When she chooses a white velvet
1920s dress for the occasion, you know there’s going to be trouble. She’s no flapper.

The improbable scene at the restaurant is potentially rich satirical territory. Global
warming, Guantánamo and the Chelsea Hotel are the attested concerns of Bunny’s
friends, while they guzzle Sancerre and fiddle with chopsticks in a room precariously
constructed over a glass-topped koi pond. But what really outrages them is that some
people buy the wrong kind of balsamic vinegar: “There are some very
decent condimentos out there, but even the best of them can’t be compared to
a tradizionale.” When Bunny scornfully objects to this choice of conversation topic, one
of the party asks what she’d rather they talk about. “Olive oil,” she answers.
I was looking forward to finding the Frankenhoffs even worse than this, in a George
Grosz sort of way, but civilian lunacies are abruptly dropped in favor of life within the
psych ward of some unnamed Manhattan hospital. Mental hospitals, like prisons or
submarines, are narrow environments for fiction, traditionally relying on the
particularities of inmates, authority figures, threats to life, rules, and how lousy the food
is. Still, Bunny seems to be eating more than she did at home. Peanut butter looms large.
So do the blue paper pajamas and tan upholstery, which offer no solace for the lack of
cigarettes and privacy.

We meet the other patients. One wears underpants outside his jeans and guards the pay
phone. Another boasts a heroic girlfriend, who ran all the way to his apartment in flip-
flops to stop him shooting himself. She’d been trying to rid herself of him at the time;
now she does his laundry. There’s an anorexic who develops a new syndrome — hair-
pulling — and a man who cries out obscenities most of the night. Nobody’s supposed to
touch anyone else.

They’re encouraged instead to participate in official activities: yoga, group therapy, arts
and crafts — and dog therapy, in which “you hang out with a dog. Pet him and stuff.”
This would suit Bunny well, she believes. But that is one irresponsible dog. He never
turns up. So she makes mosaics and attends creative writing, from which seem to
emanate the adroit autobiographical sketches that periodically appear throughout the
book, on such subjects as “A Shoebox” or “An Imaginary World.” She also takes to filling
legal pads, perhaps with commentary on her new mental health adventure for her next
novel. We’re not exactly told.

Being incarcerated paradoxically forces Bunny to reconnect with other people and her
own mind. She’s alert to the sanity of the insane, and the ineptitude of most of the staff.
What with all the peanut butter and this new sociabililty, things are looking up, you
might think, but Bunny’s progress is too slow for the doctors. They want to put her on
massive doses of drugs. When she objects, the only alternative is electroconvulsive
therapy. Must every flirtation with madness end this way? It’s chilling.
It is not hard to pity Bunny, but even the narrator seems to balk at warming to her.
When not prostrate and crying, Bunny can be mean, delivering a sucker punch of a
riposte. She tastelessly mangles the known facts of Anne Frank’s life in order to make a
banal point (“yoo-hoo, Anne, get real”), and seems to be callously alluding to 9/11 when
she mulls over people forced to decide whether to burn to death or jump out the window
and fall “splat” on the sidewalk. To her credit, she rushes to the defense of octopuses,
acknowledges pet rocks and delights in “the toot of a fart.” But when Albie gives her a
recent, well-reviewed novel for Christmas, she throws it across the room. Maybe a sign
of returning health.

Humor leaks out through the gloom. Kirshenbaum’s best when she’s unpredictable. But
the book gradually settles into a familiar genre, an update on what it’s like in the “zoo” —
Jonathan Winters’s term for psychiatric institutions. It’s the sort of thing Winters may
well have had in mind when he jokily praised writers who know how “to sell your
troubles and bug other people.”

Lucy Ellmann’s seventh novel, “Ducks, Newburyport,” will be published in September.

RABBITS FOR FOOD

By Binnie Kirshenbaum
371 pp. Soho Press. $26.