One's Company

Starred review from April 11, 2022
Hutson’s affecting and ingenious debut follows a woman’s attempt to find refuge from her tragic reality. Bonnie is known in her small town as the convenience store clerk who survived a vicious robbery in which she was sexually assaulted and the store’s owners murdered. Alone in her trailer, she develops an obsession with the 1970s sitcom Three’s Company, in which she finds a “surrogate family, impervious to death or harm.” After she wins a massive lottery payout, she buys a mountaintop property and recreates the show’s apartment complex. Hutson succeeds in describing Bonnie’s quasi-religious devotion to the pop culture artifact without resorting to pompousness. Rather, Hutson instills the enterprise with Bonnie’s sense of impending doom, which she expresses in self-aware narration: “Farce punishes everyone eventually.” The project unfolds in complete secrecy, the actors and crew required to sign NDAs, read Bonnie’s dry synopsis of the show, and watch an episode. (Readers will likely be put in mind of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder more than once.) Once the giant replica set is built, Bonnie plays the sitcom’s various characters in turn, though her isolated splendor is threatened when outsiders intrude onto the compound. This darkly clever work dramatizes the necessity and fragility of illusions, showing how they can crumble when broadcast to the world. Hutson is off to a brilliant start.

May 15, 2022
Bonnie Lincoln, the thirtysomething protagonist of Hutson's engaging debut, is obsessed with the late-1970s, early-1980s sitcom, Three's Company. Bonnie is also the survivor of a horrific trauma that robbed her of most of her chosen family. When she wins an enormous amount of money in the lottery, Bonnie decides she's going to use her fortune to recreate the set of the beloved television series in a remote area and retreat entirely from the real world so that she can live in this literal fantasy world she's constructed for herself. But as much as Bonnie wants to shut the world out, intrusions keep popping up, from a catastrophic storm to a charming survivalist named Rita to Bonnie's former best friend, Krystal, who is mired in her own grief but seeking to connect with Bonnie even as Bonnie does everything she can to push Krystal away. The conclusion might not satisfy everyone, but there's much to appreciate in Hutson's deft exploration of the toll trauma takes as well as both the lure and dangers of disappearing into a fantasy world.

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Starred review from April 15, 2022
A woman obsessed with the show Three's Company wins the lottery and replicates the world of the sitcom to live in. Bonnie Lincoln is a Three's Company superfan: She's got multiple copies of all 172 episodes of the beloved 1970s TV show as well as small items of memorabilia: T-shirts, tickets to tapings. She can't afford much living in a trailer and working at Scheele's Market, a mom-and-pop grocery owned by the family of her best friend, Krystal. But when Bonnie buys a ticket for a record-setting lottery and then emerges as the sole winner, she knows immediately what she'll do with the money: buy an enormous parcel of land and set to work replicating every last detail, to the food in the cupboards, of the Three's Company environment. No one, not even Krystal, knows all the details or the depth of Bonnie's obsession: "Other people can ruin a dream," Bonnie muses, "just by knowing it." Hutson swings back and forth between the building of Bonnie's obsessive and isolated fantasy and her life before, uncovering the forces in her past--first the death of her father by suicide, then the death of her mother a few years later, and finally a horrifying trauma suffered by both her and Krystal--that led Bonnie to turn so wholly away from the real world and into the sun-soaked nostalgia of a sitcom. Hutson is far too smart, though, to turn Bonnie into an easy case study on the effects of trauma; Bonnie is both self-aware and resolute that her turn away from the world is justified. Hutson's prose, too, is as cleareyed and convincing as the novel's premise is farcical. But, as Bonnie reminds us, "Farce punishes everyone eventually." Looks at trauma, wealth, and infatuation through a startlingly original lens.

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