Kitten is a claustrophobic coming-of-age novel about Katie, a twenty-two-year-old recent graduate in New York who has no job, no stable home, an estranged mother in Little Rock, a first boyfriend named James, and a disastrous attachment to his family’s cat, Silver. It wants to be a sharp novel about mother-daughter enmeshment, class shame, dependency, arrested development, pet love, female friendship, and the pain of becoming an adult without knowing whether one has a self sturdy enough to grow into. Mostly, it is an over-controlled, airless novel of tiny bodily humiliations and over-read symbols, built around the death of a cat and determined to make every tongue, window, bowl of milk, burst blood vessel, pee stain, fly, pastry, and sea-swim tremble with meaning.
Katie’s life is already unstable when James introduces her to Silver. James is her first boyfriend, older, richer, gentler, and more competent than she is in almost every practical way. He has missed Katie’s actual birthday because of work, but he has arranged a dinner and presents. Lou, Katie’s roommate and closest friend, has bought her cupcakes and is irritated by James’s smooth generosity. Katie herself is distracted by the fact that she has not spoken to her mother in a year. She is twenty-two and feels the rest of life approaching like a threat.
Silver belongs to James’s parents, who are away, and James is looking after her temporarily. Katie drops the cat the first time she holds her. Silver lands on her feet, immediately seeming more magical and self-possessed than any person in the book. James tells Katie that he found Silver years earlier on the beach at Holme, sick and alone, and nursed her back to life despite a vet’s prediction that she would die. The cat becomes, almost instantly, the object into which Katie pours all the feelings she cannot manage with human beings: need, jealousy, pity, tenderness, violence, envy, disgust, and a childlike desire to keep something completely.
