by Max Parker
November 20, 2024
Max Parker is a queer writer from the Pacific Northwest currently living in Brooklyn. Max holds an MFA from Stony Brook University, and reads for Split Lip Magazine and West Trade Review. Max’s work appears in The Palisades Review, West Trade Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Mid Magazine, and The Southampton Review. Their poem “Secrets and Surprises” won the 2022 West Trade Review Prize for Poetry, selected by Kemi Alabi. Contact at www.maxparker.me.
The Burrow by Melanie Cheng; Tin House; 200 pages; $16.95.
Melanie Cheng’s second novel, The Burrow, brings readers inside the pervasive hopelessness following family loss, where every day feels like an impossibility and anger comes easier than acceptance. The novel moves between the four voices of the Lee family, including the father, Jin; mother, Amy; grandmother, Pauline; and Jin and Amy’s ten-year-old daughter, Lucie, as they move in quiet discomfort around each other following the death of Amy and Jin’s infant daughter, Ruby. When the family adopts a small rabbit, Fiver, his presence opens a space for each character to both confront and care for their grief as they otherwise struggle to feel present with each other. Beyond just a story about a family amidst extreme and complicated grief, The Burrow examines how loss disrupts entire identities and relationships, how rebuilding these connections only comes from confronting the pain head-on.
Cheng set The Burrow during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne, four years after Ruby drowned when Pauline suffered a stroke, a compounding tragedy difficult to bear or separate. Although four years have passed, the Lee family is still fragmented by extreme grief, only made more obvious by the lockdown regulations confining them to the same shared space. The family home becomes a burrow in itself: characters hiding inside their isolation, more often watching each other than actually interacting, sure-footed only in their own feelings and unable to comprehend the landscape of anyone else’s grief against their own.
Jin, an emergency doctor, struggles to find fulfillment in his work and home life after failing to save Ruby. Amy, a writer, regards her previous creativity as self-indulgent, leading her to envy her husband’s purposeful work. Both lost in the despair of having lost a child, Jin and Amy fight to remain present forces in Lucie’s life, even as Lucie tries to take up as little space as possible. When Amy’s mother, Pauline, breaks her wrist and is recommended to stay with the Lees during her rehabilitation, the first time visiting since Ruby’s death, the Lee family’s grief becomes even more stifling. Fiver the rabbit provides a common healing object in which each character finds some level of solace, concretizing each individual’s fragile hope and desire to find a framework to move forward. “Perhaps this was the purpose of pets,” Pauline thinks upon meeting Fiver, “to provide a buffer between humans who had forgotten how to talk to one another.” Fiver proves a meaningful cipher for many of the novel’s pivotal moments toward acceptance, most directly when Pauline stays behind to watch a sick Fiver while Jin, Amy, and Lucie go to visit Jin’s parents in the first ease of lockdown restrictions. The decision comes after Jin and Amy discuss whether or not they trust Pauline with the responsibility—Amy offering to stay behind several times while Jin says it could be an opportunity to heal or otherwise run away, the conversation later giving way to their first on-page direct conversation about Ruby’s death.
The novel’s structure is quick-moving: chapters alternate between character perspectives and are typically only three to five pages in length. Despite the rapid pace, each perspective feels earned and lived in, able to move the narrative forward each chapter while also uncovering new emotional ground. Although they all suffered the same loss, each family member’s grief is highly specific to their worldview, allowing readers a multi-faceted way-in that never feels repetitive, despite the novel’s relatively simple premise.
Cheng writes in prose that is understated and direct, pulling quick, lucid punches that capture the paranoia of carrying on after loss. The Burrow opens with Jin driving the rabbit home to Lucie, rapidly cycling through disturbing thoughts—fearing the bunny is already dead in the carrying box until the memory of unsuccessfully resuscitating Ruby prompts him to give in to his fears and pull over to check. Finding the rabbit still alive, Jin laughs at his fear, suddenly recognizing its absurdity before once again faltering back to the macabre. “Jin had a choice…he could caress the rabbit’s head, or he could snap his tiny neck. Jin removed his hand and closed the lid.” This is a familiar pattern of thinking throughout the novel for each of the Lees, all of whom are consumed by the horror of Ruby’s unexpected death and fighting to make sense of life without her in it. In Cheng’s refusal to look away from the open wound, readers are invited into unflinchingly honest internal landscapes, even when the characters aren’t forthcoming with each other.
Fiver is further highlighted through his frequent comparisons to a newborn, directly linking his life as symbolic of a second chance in caretaking. The infant comparisons are both general, such when Pauline wipes Fiver’s face “as if he were a baby,” and specific to Ruby, like when Lucie meets the rabbit and perceives him as “fleshy and lumpy,” like “Ruby when she was first born.” Though the rabbit is often described as enigmatic and unenthusiastic, “Didn’t people know that rabbits didn’t love you back?” Jin thinks during a moment of exasperation —the act of keeping him alive transcends feelings about the rabbit itself, growing to include Ruby and each family member’s love for her. In this sense, simple actions such as putting mosquito netting over Fiver’s hutch or taking him to the vet after Lucie perceives an unshakeable feeling that there’s “something wrong” take on new and heartbreaking meaning—each hyper-vigilant action proof that the Lee family is laboring under the hope they may absolve themself from the immeasurable grief of losing Ruby, and the discomforting suspicion that they should have been able to stop it.
The novel progresses not through large, definitive moments of catharsis but rather incremental gestures of connection that signal a way forward. While Pauline brings Lucie the focused attention she’s been craving amidst her parents’ grief, reading her Watership Down and acting as Lucie’s confidant, Jin and Amy find their way back to each other through halting compromise, testing and relearning their support system after such extreme loss and subsequent personality changes. Exterior changes such as Jin’s COVID-19 exposure and a house break-in act as physical markers that while grief may feel endless, the randomness of life forces one to move forward, adapting as best possible. The Burrow centers everyday, fragile human moments, boldly asking whether prayer works, what we owe each other, and how the family remains after loss.
The Burrow succeeds in its refusal to present a “tidy” resolution of grief for the Lees, inviting readers inside each held breath and Cheng creates a space where grief exists as an unending process, a reality that each character must tolerate and learn to accept as constant. When combined with the breakneck pacing, The Burrow begs reading in one sitting, curled up in one’s own burrow as the outside world falls away, forever secondary to the pain of remaining alive.
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Relearning the Family: Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow Overcomes the Isolation of Grief
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Civan D. from Pexels
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