Stacey Levine’s newest novel, Mice 1961, is another intriguing gallivant through a small community. I’ve come to think of this as Levine’s trademark style. She writes of a group big enough that you cannot remember each person in detail, nor does she seem to want you to. In fact, one character is The Artist with the Scarf. Yet, the group is limited in that we do not traverse into the wider world — a different community, a neighboring city, the nation at large.

Once she has her players set up, Levine puts them in high-emotion, low-stakes conflict. As everyone gathers for a community potluck, they harangue a young woman for her discovery: she had some blue fruit, she cooked it, she put that into water, and now her dish to pass is blue drink. Except the group demeans her — it’s not even juice! — until they’re claiming she brought water in a pail. The group’s bizarre dynamic cleverly leaves you laughing yet curious about their accusatory dispositions. It is this potluck day around which the novel centers.

The narrator is Girtle, a young, homeless woman who has come to live with Jody and Mice. Even her living situation is absurd: “Did either one of them ever check behind the couch to look at me as I looked at them? Did they even once remember that I was staying there?” Girtle spends the story hiding out behind trees and bushes, corners and furniture, narrating what she overhears without interacting much herself. She’s is tasked by Jody (the older sister) to keep an eye on Mice. At times, I wondered at the choice of narrator, but she mimics the skittishness of her charge, as if Mice is narrating and watching herself. The point of view is unique, sometimes impossible.

Both women are young adults, out of school. They’re well-known in the community due to their abnormalities: “So the story of the half-blind colorless girl with the now-dead mother, an angry, impulsive, unknowable sister, and a blank of a vanished father spread to the most distant neighborhoods, since that is what words and stories do.” Levine never uses the word “albino,” but the description of Mice fits the label. For her differences, Mice is taunted by high school children and dismissed by adults, so she spends a good deal on the page scurrying around and hiding in unreachable nooks.

I wouldn’t say Mice 1961 is about a “poor, defenseless” woman with a disability. In fact, all characters are raked over the coals for the strangest reasons, highlighting the way communities are judging all its members for suspicious behavior. Here is an example: “The truth is Sherrie you and your sister’re so young and pale that neither of you understands what it means to have eyebrows!” What does that even mean? And does it matter that it means little on the surface? If you note the year in the title, you realize Levine has set her novel during the Cold War hysteria, possibly the reason all characters are suspect. While Levine doesn’t go in depth on the subject, she makes reference so you don’t forget:

“I mean as a young person . . . well what d’you think of the world situation?” [asked Moates].
Honey laughed. “What do I think . . . what? The whole world? She shook her head, wrinkled her nose at the two men.
Remnick pitched in, “You see Larry and I’ve been talking about the A-bomb. How it could be the start of humanity’s end. Or will we step up as a species and learn to get along?”

Very little of the novel is directly about Mice or Girtle or Jody, but instead highlights the absurdity of life and turns the dial to eleven. I was reminded of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson and Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller, and even a touch of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” (a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone). Still, Levine has a style all her own. When I start a new Levine novel, I think, “Yep, that’s her.”

Compared to Levine’s previous novel Frances Johnson, her newest novel feels a little long. It can be challenging to dip in and out of because once you’re into this askew community, everything around you goes away. To put the book down and come back to it later, it’s like you need a moment to get on Mr. Rogers’s train into the World of Make Believe and ride into a new place.

Thank you to Stacey Levine for reaching out to me, and to Verse Chorus Press for sending me a reviewer’s copy.