Seven years ago my wife was jogging in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, just before dawn, when a Mazda coupe struck her at high speed. The driver, a young man with a history of mental illness, had stolen the car. She bounced onto the hood, picking up the vehicle’s velocity. Her scalp smashed the windshield as she rolled off and across pavement, shattering vertebrae and her pelvis. Another jogger saw the taillights swerve away and called 911. After a weeklong sedation and multiple surgeries, she began her road to physical rehabilitation, one of 2 percent with these severe injuries to make a full recovery.
Set mostly in 2016, Jennifer Haigh’s adept if patchy “Rabbit Moon” evokes the agonizing fallout of a hit-and-run accident — how, in the twitch of an eyelid, tragedy exposes fears and resentments that seethe through a suburban Boston family. In the wee hours of a June morning, a car knocks 22-year-old Lindsey Litvak into a coma amid Shanghai’s financial district. She’d withdrawn from Wesleyan and was hunkered down in Beijing with her boyfriend until the relationship soured. Unbeknownst to her divorced parents, Aaron and Claire, she’d moved to Shanghai, beguiled by a skyline “sleek and fantastically shaped — a perfume bottle, a hypodermic needle, strategically lit like sculptures in a galley. The streetlamps wear Mickey Mouse ears.” The city was (and is) emblematic of China’s global ascendency. Here she’d earned income as an escort in the employ of Mei, a madam with connections to moneyed men. With her best friend, Johnny Du, a hair stylist, Lindsey binges on old DVDs of “Snow White” and “The Little Mermaid.”
Claire and Aaron now rally to their daughter’s hospital room, bringing their petty snobberies and luxury beliefs along for the ride. Haigh holds a steady narrative momentum as she bores into each character’s backstory. Before college, Lindsey had been a stellar high-school student in Newton, learning Mandarin and bonding with her kid sister, Grace, who was adopted from a Chinese orphanage. Aaron, a Harvard MBA graduate, had sold his tech start-up to a corporation while retaining control; he’d traveled frequently, a distant husband and father. Claire made a go as a writer but failed to publish. Their marriage had unraveled when they’d discovered Lindsey had embarked on a consensual (and legal) relationship with Dean Farrell, a family friend some 30 years her senior.
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The couple grapples with unfinished business as they hover at the bedside, conferring with ICU physicians and nurses. Haigh amplifies their dread, the challenges of a foreign metropolis and a language they can’t speak. Claire scans an English newspaper, headlines that blare the opening of Disney Shanghai, a motif Haigh threads throughout the novel. She “feels ashamed of her own country, momentarily apologetic toward the Chinese people. In her view, the Disney franchise is yet another American export, like carbon emissions or troop deployments or fast food or nuclear waste.”
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Lindsey’s flashbacks comprise the most affecting scenes, the twisted journey that leads her to the wrong place at the wrong time. Her illicit teenage affair with Dean had wrecked the Litvaks: while Lindsey blamed Claire’s helicopter mothering; Claire blames Aaron’s absences and apathy. The pace ticks up once Mei takes Lindsey under her wing, arranging dalliances from cocktail receptions to kinky sex, a job the young woman jeopardizes when she falls in love with a client. Shanghai emerges as a character in its own right, frocked in vivid detail. Lindsey explores her neighborhood: “the souvenir shops and tourist cafés near Jing’an Temple; the side streets with their fruit stands and corner groceries and noodle bars. Each morning she bought a milk tea from an automated stall. She poked at a touch screen to choose her desired temperature (ice, cold, warm, hot) and sweetness level. … In less than a minute her beverage was dispensed, in a foil-sealed cup.” At times, though, Haigh’s descriptions feel desultory, random entries in a writer’s notebook.
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A tug between East and West propels “Rabbit Moon,” two superpowers flexing their muscles as the 21st century unfolds. Grace, a budding adolescent off at summer camp in New Hampshire, is a vessel for this tension and also Haigh’s themes of cultural appropriation, the privileged forced to confront contradictions within their moral codes. Claire realizes her complicity: “The rescue mission. Claire Litvak, the white hero, had saved her Chinese daughter from untold horrors, whisked her away to an idyllic suburban childhood, music lessons and expensive orthodontia, private school and Santa Claus. She’d given zero thought to all that Grace was losing: birth mother, motherland, mother tongue.” The Litvaks’ views of China — the shock of crowds and intense heat, food-kiosk aromas, sparse apartments — aggravate their unease. They never let go of their inner Newton, clinging to an American myth long past its prime.
“Rabbit Moon,” then, is a family drama in the mode of recent novels by Ann Patchett and Claire Lombardo. Middle-aged ennui, class anxiety, a clash of cultures, male predation: Haigh dutifully hits her marks. It’s a solid book that doesn’t quite soar, but at its best it plumbs the elements that compose love — a parent’s instinct, a flood of brain synapses, hormonal urges, hard work — and exposes the ways our fates are linked in this dazed and shrinking world.
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RABBIT MOON
By Jennifer Haigh
Little, Brown, 288 pages, $29
Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.” He lives in Brooklyn.