Anna Goldreich's 'The Leveret': A Grief Novel That Earns Its Device

Anna Goldreich's debut novel The Leveret arrives with buzz about its writing, and the buzz is justified, according to the California Review of Books. The reviewer's verdict is blunt: "No question, it is."

Goldreich, per the review, writes with more assurance and clarity than readers expect from a first novel. Her story is poignant, intimate, full of sensuous detail and what the critic calls "emotional heft" — a moving and elegant debut.

What happens to Clare and Phoebe?

After losing their baby, Clare and Phoebe move to a country farm owned by Phoebe's family. Both women are devastated, though in different ways. Phoebe, back on childhood turf, loses herself in work. Clare, the newcomer, broods alone about why they're in the old house, where in-laws and parents drop in unannounced and unwanted.

Nobody wants to talk about what happened. Phoebe's family prefers roses and camelias, the vegetable plot, the greenhouse, livestock and the local pub — a horticultural smokescreen over the household's grief.

The novel alternates point of view: prose for Clare, verse for Phoebe. The form carries the couple's estrangement. "Sometimes," Clare thinks, "I wish we'd never started. The whole thing, I wish we'd never done it." The reviewer notes the syringe of sperm "felt intrusive and contrived" to Clare, and cost all the money her nanna left her. Phoebe's answer comes in verse: "It's different with you, losing you. You're still here so am I allowed to mourn our life?"

What does the hare change?

One day Clare finds a baby hare in the garden — a leveret, as a young hare is called. It seems abandoned: no more than a clump of earth, golden, one eye glowing bright. Clare holds it to her face, smells its scent, feels its breath against her neck. Small as a fist.

She takes the animal home, beds it in a cardboard box, feeds it powdered kitten milk with a syringe, feels its heartbeat. Clare names the leveret Isla and becomes obsessed with mothering her. The device — the leveret as substitute for the lost baby — might seem facile, the reviewer concedes, but Goldreich handles it with aplomb. "Each morning, I wake with the thrill of knowing that she will be there and we will get to spend another day together," Clare says. Cuddling Isla, she remembers first meeting Phoebe, the need to know her and be known in return.

Can the couple escape the spiral?

Inevitably, Isla's wild nature asserts itself. The leveret claws holes in the walls and shreds the living room rug. Phoebe hates the smell of urine and scat but feels powerless; Clare gets kicked and bitten. Alarmed, Phoebe fears leaving Clare alone, and her family urges her to act. The review ends on the question the novel sustains: can these young women escape the spiral and find one another again? Goldreich, the critic writes, makes us hope they do.

The review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.