Rabbits for Food

Starred review from March 18, 2019
Kirshenbaum’s first novel in 10 years (The Scenic Route)—a tour de force about 43-year-old novelist Bunny’s descent into an abysmal clinical depression—is a remarkable achievement that expertly blends pathos and humor. Readers meet the self-effacing Bunny in a psych ward, waiting for a therapy dog that never arrives. From there, the narrative backtracks to follow Bunny’s trajectory from accomplished writer to being another one of the “lunatics.” The death of her best friend tipped Bunny into her downward spiral, which bottoms out at a suffocating New Year’s Eve dinner that goes very bad. Soon, she’s checked in to a psych ward and under the care of doctors whose ideas about treatment diverge sharply from her own. There are hints of pending doom in flashbacks of Bunny’s childhood: she felt out of place as the middle child in a middle-class home, and her outspoken (and generally caustic) observations were resented by her family. Amid the backstory and Bunny’s razor-sharp scrutiny of living in a mental hospital, Kirshenbaum sprinkles in Bunny’s brilliantly written and revelatory responses to the writing prompts given in the psych ward’s creative writing class. Elsewhere, Bunny’s cutting riffs on life in New York City, the psychiatrists she has seen throughout her life, and the effects of numerous medications, are eye-opening. Comparisons to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest are obvious and warranted, but Kirshenbaum’s dazzling novel stands on its own as a crushing work of immense heart.

March 15, 2019
A writer experiences a breakdown and ends up hospitalized; against all odds, hilarity ensues."The dog is late," says Bunny, "and I'm wearing pajamas made from the same material as Handi Wipes, which is reason enough for me to wish I were dead." Bunny is seated on a bench in a psych ward waiting for the therapy dog to arrive. It never does. After a New Year's Eve breakdown, preceded by months of severe depression--she found herself unable to leave her apartment or sleep or eat or shower--Bunny has landed in a Manhattan hospital surrounded by the fellow patients she refers to, variously, as inmates, lunatics, psychos, and loons. Occasionally her husband, Albie, visits, bearing chocolate bars and peanut butter. Kirshenbaum's (The Scenic Route, 2009, etc.) latest novel follows Bunny, whose name is just one vowel sound away from Kirshenbaum's own, through her depression and hospitalization. Surprisingly, the book is hilarious. Bunny has no patience for self-delusion or pretension; she's sharp-tongued and deliciously mean. (Like Kirshenbaum, she's a writer--they share other biographical details, too.) Anticipating the New Year's Eve party she and Albie attend every year, Bunny describes "catching up with people they've not seen since the New Year's Eve before because who would want to see these people by choice?" Kirshenbaum's prose is lean and her timing is impeccable; even better, her descriptions of Bunny's intellectual "friends" are sharply unforgiving. At dinner, one friend "wants to know if any of them have read the Bolaño. That's how he refers to 2666, as 'the Bolaño.' " The novel is just as strong once Bunny gets to the hospital, where she refuses medication. If anything, the book's end comes too soon.Kirshenbaum is a remarkable writer of fiercely observed fiction and a bleak, stark wit; her latest novel is as moving as it is funny, and that--truly--is saying something.

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June 14, 2019

As the year winds down in Kirshenbaum's latest novel, her first since 2009's The Scenic Route, Bunny spirals downward into a devastating depression. Even husband Albie's devotion cannot keep her from landing in a Manhattan psych ward. Bunny has never had an easy personality, which makes her first name a bit incongruous, but it serves her well as she applies her skills as a novelist to chronicle and critique the lives of both patients and doctors in the mental institution. Bunny is so sardonic as to be completely unsympathetic, but this is exactly what makes her such an intriguing and complex character. VERDICT Kirshenbaum has excelled at capturing one woman's disturbing mental illness and the daily struggles to cope with survival even in a setting that supposedly offers support and rehabilitation. Drawing parallels to Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest comes easily because of the similar setting and a cast of characters supporting the main character. Recommended.--Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2019
When asked if Bunny is her real name, this high-strung New York writer, who barely survived childhood in a calamitously unloving family, says that she got her name because her parents raised rabbits. For food. Acidly smart and unfiltered, Bunny does not suffer fools gladly; in fact, she now does nothing with joy. She can barely get off the couch. In what should be a time of hope as the first African American president takes office for his first term, caustic Bunny is overwhelmed by rage and anguish. In her first novel in a decade, Kirshenbaum reclaims her scepter as a shrewdly lacerating comedic writer, joining Sylvia Plath, Ken Kesey, Will Self, Ned Vizzini, Siri Hustvedt, and others in writing darkly funny and incisive fiction about life in a psychiatric hospital ward. As Bunny slouches toward equilibrium, finds camaraderie with other patients, and is able to write again, thus granting readers mordant glimpses into her past, Kirshenbaum offers a veritable primer on depression, spiked with lines like: Despair cannot be monitored like blood pressure or measured in centimeters like a tumor. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)