Little Rabbit

March 7, 2022
Songsiridej’s hot and sometimes heavy-handed debut tracks the relationship of an unnamed narrator, a writer, with a choreographer 20 years her senior. Though the choreographer had initially annoyed the narrator when they met at a residency (he called her “Little Rabbit” because she was “always running off to work”), she agrees to attend his dance performance. Eventually, they begin sleeping together. “Rabbit” commutes from the Boston area to visit him, either at his luxe New York City apartment or his spacious Berkshires country house. Her roommate and best friend, Annie, disapproves; Rabbit is bisexual and Annie, a lesbian, wants her to date women. But the choreographer has a wealthy ex-wife benefactor, and to pay it forward, he offers to support Rabbit’s writing career. As Rabbit gets in deeper, the relationship veers into S&M territory, and though Rabbit does not want to be the choreographer’s “little woman,” she enjoys playing a submissive role. Some of the messages about class differences and sexuality feel a bit overstated, but the progression of the relationship is subtle and intriguing, and Songsiridej pulls off sex scenes that a lesser writer could have made cringeworthy. It adds up to an addictive tale of obsessive love.

April 1, 2022
A 30-year-old writer begins a fraught sexual relationship with a 51-year-old choreographer. The unnamed narrator of Songsiridej's debut attends a dance performance choreographed by a much older man--also unnamed--whom she meets at a residency. Afterward, at dinner, he orders a gin martini, and somehow that does the trick. "I knew, right then, that I would sleep with him." Why? It's unclear. For a dedicated writer, up at 5 a.m. every day to write before her administrative job, the narrator has a surprisingly limited vocabulary. In the onslaught of sex scenes and seductions that ensue, she fails to summon the specificity that might convince a reader of their chemistry. Instead, strange word choices ("I...made gutted animal sounds"), frequent clich�s ("More, my body called, harder"), and awkward phrasing ("I froze as if with fright, but fright mixed with a pulse") all make for a confusing and uncomfortable read. In the merciful intermissions between the sex scenes, the narrator ruminates--with equal vagueness--on her sexual submissiveness with an older, wealthier man and her loosening ties with the queer community. Her relationship with her roommate and supposed friend, Annie, is deteriorating, though given how jealous, controlling, and astonishingly na�ve Annie is ("You stayed at his apartment," she says to the narrator. "A stranger?"), one can't help but think their relationship is better off dead. "I knew what Annie wanted," the narrator thinks, "a narrative, a pattern of elegantly spaced beats between 'bad' and 'good' to vindicate both my attitude then and how I felt about the choreographer now." As it happens, the reader might want some of these things, too, and in the end, this novel fails to deliver them. An exploration of sexual dynamics that is too vague to illuminate or provoke.

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June 1, 2022

DEBUT From Electric Literature managing editor Songsiridej, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, this puzzling if refreshingly risk-taking debut examines the complexities of love and desire via the steamy relationship between a wealthy, established male choreographer and an aspiring young female writer, the book's unnamed narrator. After they meet at a residency in Maine, she agrees to attend a dance performance he's staging, and they quickly plunge into a relationship thrumming with erotic energy. As she is bisexual and has had some bad experiences with men, this turn of events alarms her lesbian friend and roommate. It alarms readers, too; how can she fall for an imperious older man who's nicknamed her Little Rabbit because she's "small and wild and determined to survive"? The novel ends with a work he choreographs for her on his lead dancer, which makes her see their love as frightening. But it doesn't frighten her away: "I thought I'd served him all this time, but he really served me. ...All to figure out what I wanted and to give." VERDICT The relationship depicted here both challenges and disturbs, which would seem to be the point. Love is inexplicable and a hard taskmaster, and if Songsiridej doesn't exactly nail what she wants, she asks important questions.

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