Rain Mountain
Review by Walter Cummins
A question hovering over Sarah McElwain’s entire novel from the very first sentence is whether the unlikely named Evening K. Titlebaum will be granted the luck that she is convinced awaits her. She is a sixteen-year-old high school dropout with a mixture of street smarts, ignorance, optimism, and delusion who navigates a dysfunctional version of Manhattan’s pre-gentrified East Village in 1999. That year is central to the story because she expects that once impregnated she will win a million dollar prize for being the first to give birth in the new century—fulfillment of her expected luck.
With a few minor exceptions, Born Lucky is seen through Evening’s perspective, skewed because of who and how she is and because the people she associates with are oddballs and misfits living on the edge of society. That includes her separated parents. She shares a cramped two-room apartment with Amanda, who gave birth to her at sixteen and is only thirty-two, now linked to a crude biker called Rosebud. Mother and daughter constantly quarrel, especially over possession of the bedroom and not having to sleep on the Hide-a-Bed in the messy other room. Frankie, her father, who does treat her to meals, makes an illegal living standing on the sidewalk and selling Rolex knockoffs to tourists.
The novel begins with Evening and her truancy partner, Melissa, shoplifting from several stores and coming close to arrest. Evening’s first disappointment happens when she learns Melissa’s family is moving her to Orlando, creating a great vacuum in Evening’s life. A collection of future associates serve as attempts to fill it.
After school officers lead her to formalize her dropping out, she finds work as a cashier in Kopy Katz, a near-bankrupt copy shop run be her father’s friend David Katz, who also brings her food. She organizes order in the chaotic showroom and checks off days on an Endangered Species calendar. Always out for a buck, she has a brief period of underage phone sex under the name Little Hottie. That’s where she makes her first contact with Peter, who will come to play an important role in the story, though how is totally unexpected, along with a new perspective on the title.
Evening also connects with Honey, a nineteen-year-old from a Caribbean island so desolate it would never attract a tourist. He becomes the father of her child. That growing fetus becomes a character in its own right, a shifting, kicking presence with an independent identity.
Through McElwain’s imagination Evening blunders into one surprising situation after another. The girl constantly has to improvise, sometimes effectively but more often getting in deeper. That doesn’t stop her from moving on to new attempts. Even when disappointed, she follows her motto of “Never give up.” The energy of her basic optimism relieves what in another way of telling about the same people and events might be disturbingly grim. Instead the situations come across as a seeming form of comedy, often at the edge of absurdity. A central reason for hope is the possibility of a reversal if Evening realizes the luck held out like the lure on the end of a stick.
