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WORK TITLE: Three Years with the Rat
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://jayhosking.com/
CITY: Vancouver
STATE: BC
COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY:
https://jayhosking.com/about/ * http://www.macleans.ca/culture/a-debut-novel-from-neuroscientist-jay-hosking-three-years-with-the-rat/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Toronto, B.Sc., 2009; University of British Columbia, Ph.D., 2014; M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, postdoctoral fellow, 2014–.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Walrus and Hazlitt.
SIDELIGHTS
Canadian Jay Hosking is both a scientist and a writer. He holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of British Columbia and is a neuroscience post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. He is teaching rats how to gamble, which is part of his research into understanding the mechanisms of choice and decision making. Hosking also holds an M.F.A. in creative writing. His short fiction has appeared in the Walrus and Hazlitt, and he has received a special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. A description of Hosking’s foot into both the worlds of science and creative arts appeared at the Metro News Online by Sue Carter: “Hosking grew up reading classic science fiction, but says he owes more of his writing to the postmodern works of Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami. A self-described arts kid—his grade eight teacher told him, ‘Whatever you do Jay, don’t go into science.’”
Nevertheless, Hosking combined all his skills in the novel, Three Years with the Rat, which mixes classic noir with speculative fiction. The story follows an underachieving, nameless narrator, called Scruffy by his friends. Deciding to move from Vancouver to Toronto to be near his beloved and brilliant older sister, Grace, he gets a job at her lab. She, along with her doting boyfriend John, is a graduate student in psychophysics. Things are looking up for Scruffy who now has a decent job, new friends, and even romance. But he starts to notice that Grace is having emotional outbursts, especially directed at a very surprised John. Then one day, Grace disappears, followed shortly by John. In their apartment, Scruffy finds a large wooden box lined inside with mirrors, a lab rat named Buddy, a notebook written in code, and a cryptic message saying “This is the only way back for us.”
Scruffy investigates what happened as best he can, but he soon realizes that Grace and John’s work, which involved the perception of time, may have inadvertently landed the couple in a parallel dimension. He discovers that Grace and John were using rats, implanted with telemetry devices, and put into the mirrored enclosure to test time travel theories. Calling the book smart and spooky, a writer in Publishers Weekly added: “Hosking grounds the fantasy and philosophical speculation firmly in a detailed version of Toronto in the early 21st century.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor praised the book for being a mixture of relationship drama and science fiction, saying: “Structured anachronistically, Hosking’s time-looping tale deftly teases the reader with well-deployed reveals and intrigues with elegantly limned science-fiction ideas.”
In an interview on the Qwillery website, Hosking explained the themes in the book: “The Rat book deals with why we seek knowledge, the better and worse reasons to do science, rather than the science itself. The book was informed by the motivations of scientists and other knowledge-seekers, with a smattering of details from the lab/research life to add verisimilitude. Psychophysics (the field of science described in the book) certainly exists, but doesn’t really resemble what I’ve written at all.”
As the novel is constructed backwards starting in 2008 and moving back to 2008, “What follows is a fragmented story that leaps across genre, but never fully comes together. …The shifting chronology also makes it difficult for readers to get their sea legs. Important information is doled out in pieces, out of reading order, and this is for a plot that’s confusing enough on its own,” said Michael Hingston in Globe and Mail. On the other hand, according to Adrian Lee on the Maclean’s website, “It’s an ambitious time-hopping story of secret cyphers, sinister revenants and the rat of the title, a freed lab specimen named Buddy who serves as a kind of rodent Virgil. Rat is written with steel-cold precision.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2016, review of Three Years with the Rat.
Publishers Weekly, October 31, 2016, review of Three Years with the Rat, p. 48.
ONLINE
Globe and Mail Online, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ (August 19, 2016), Michael Hingston, review of Three Years with the Rat.
Jay Hosking Website, https://jayhosking.com (August 1, 2017), author profile.
Maclean’s, http://www.macleans.ca/ (August 6, 2016), Adrian Lee, review of Three Years with the Rat.
Metro News Online, http://www.metronews.ca/ (August 10, 2016), Sue Carter, “How Jay Hosking used his Ph.D. in neuroscience to write Three Years with the Rat.”
Qwillery, http://qwillery.blogspot.com/ (January 24, 2017), author interview.*
About
cheers
Photo by Ronnie Ellis (I think. Beer was involved.)
jayhosking <>at<> gmail.com, @DocHosking on Twitter
Research and writing fiction are how I spend my time. Currently I’m a Neuroscience post-doc at Harvard and finishing up a Creative Writing MFA at the University of British Columbia. I’m also usually involved in the music scene of whatever city I’m living in. Feel free to click on the links for more self-aggrandizing information.
Neuroscience
2014-?, Harvard University: Postdoctoral Fellowship with Dr. Joshua Buckholtz.
2009-2014, University of British Columbia: PhD in Neuroscience with Dr. Catharine Winstanley; CIHR Doctoral Fellowship
2005-2009, University of Toronto: Honours BSc in Neuroscience; NSERC Undergraduate Summer Research Award; graduated with High Distinction
My research interests are in the neurocircuitry and neurochemistry underlying individual differences in decision making. For my PhD, specifically, I studied cognitive effort: how we use it to obtain potentially larger rewards, why some (“hard workers”) are more willing to expend it than others (“slackers”), and the neuroscience that reflects this effortful decision making.
My science publications (feel free to email me for copies):
Full publication list on Google Scholar
My research in the media/press:
Coffee Makes Hard Workers Lazy, Rat Study Suggests – Huffington Post, 29th March, 2012
Caffeine makes hard workers slack off, rat study shows – CBC, 28th March, 2012
Amphetamines actually cause workers to slack off: UBC study – The Toronto Star, 28th March, 2012
find the grad student
“Now one could say, at the risk of some superficiality, that there exist principally two types of scientists. The ones, and they are rare, wish to understand the world, to know nature; the others, much more frequent, with to explain it. The first are searching for truth, often with the knowledge that they will not attain it; the second strive for plausibility, for the achievement of an intellectually consistent, and hence successful, view of the world. … It is almost an intrinsic part of our concept of science that we never know enough. At all times one could almost say that we can explain it all, but understand only very little.” – Erwin Chargaff, A Grammar of Biology from Voices in the Labyrinth
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Interview with Jay Hosking, author of Three Years with the Rat
Please welcome Jay Hosking to The Qwillery as part of the 2017 Debut Author Challenge interviews! Three Years with the Rat is published on January 24th by Thomas Dunne Books. Please join The Qwillery in wishing Jay a Happy Publication Day!
TQ: Welcome to The Qwillery. When and why did you start writing?
Jay: Thanks for having me! I started writing in 2011, when I was working toward my PhD in neuroscience. Being in the lab all the time was making me into a crazy person. I had always been a voracious reader of fiction, and always wanted to write, so I snuck into a writing workshop at my university.
TQ: Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?
Jay: Both, but not at the same time. The Rat book has three years playing out at the same time, and thus required that the timeline was consistent and easy to understand, so plotting in advance was important. I had a spreadsheet that detailed what had to happen in each chapter of each year.
The new book I'm working on, however, requires a lot more "pantsing".
TQ: What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?
Jay: Finding the time to do it.
TQ: What has influenced / influences your writing?
Jay: Hoo boy. Just about everything! Other fiction, cities, nature, friends, loved ones, minutiae (like a scrap of paper on the ground) that get my mind spinning.
TQ: Describe Three Years with the Rat in 140 characters or less.
Jay: A young man's sister and friend go missing. The only clues: a box made of mirrors and a note that says, "This is the only way back for us."
TQ: Tell us something about Three Years with the Rat that is not found in the book description.
Jay: The Rat book is about what happens when the known brushes up against the unknown.
TQ: What inspired you to write Three Years with the Rat? How did your background in neuroscience influence the novel?
Jay: I'm not sure what inspired me to write the Rat book. It started with the image of the box: wooden, big enough to fit a person but too small to stand up, covered with mirrors inside, reflections upon reflections to infinity. I thought about why someone would build that box, and I was sure it was a gift to someone lost, and a tool. And then the story unspooled from there.
As for my background in neuroscience, I'm not sure it directly influenced the novel. If anything, the Rat book deals with why we seek knowledge, the better and worse reasons to do science, rather than the science itself. The book was informed by the motivations of scientists and other knowledge-seekers, with a smattering of details from the lab/research life to add verisimilitude. Psychophysics (the field of science described in the book) certainly exists, but doesn't really resemble what I've written at all.
TQ: What sort of research did you do for Three Years with the Rat?
Jay: I kept three books on my desk as I wrote the Rat book: Flatland by E. A. Abbott, Nothing: A Very Short Introduction by Frank Close, and The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. Living in a multi-dimensional universe, defining nebulous concepts, and finding meaning in a purposeless existence: these were my research.
TQ: Please tell us about Three Years with the Rat's cover?
Jay: The cover is by C.S. Richardson, a Canadian gent who has made countless fantastic dust jackets (I'm fond of his cover for Sam Wiebe's Invisible Dead, how it works in different ways at different distances). One thing I like about the Rat book's cover is that it isn't too on the nose and doesn't depict anything from the novel. But its motif—the labyrinth—is a great metaphor for the journey of the main character in the book. Plus, lab rats and mazes, right?
TQ: In Three Years with the Rat who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?
Jay: Buddy the rat was definitely the easiest character to write. I feel for that little guy. Hardest character to write was probably the narrator, who I wanted to play his cards pretty close to his chest (a la Raymond Chandler's Marlowe) but also be strongly emotionally invested in the journey.
TQ: Why have you chosen to include or not chosen to include social issues in Three Years with the Rat?
Jay: The social issues in my book are relatively subtle, and they are included because they are a part of life. We all know people who have struggled, and to not include these struggles when they are so common would be willfully distorting reality for the purposes of personal bias. Put another way, writing an apolitical book is a political act. But like I said, the issues are not the story, and not particularly featured in the book.
TQ: Which question about Three Years with the Rat do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!
Jay: Great question! And because I've never been asked it, I've never thought about it. Let me think now... hmm.
Still thinking...
TQ: Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from Three Years with the Rat.
Jay:
"I can collect all the data in the universe, but at some point I won't be able to comprehend how all the parts form a whole. My brain, my biology, limits my ability to understand... There are just some things that are outside of comprehension, even if we can quantify them. At some point, science becomes magic."
TQ: What's next?
Jay: I'm currently finishing up another novel, tentatively called "Chimera", and publishing short stories in a few literary magazines; feel free to check out some of my short fiction here and here!
TQ: Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.
Jay: Thank you so much! It was really fun to be included. Please go read Three Years with the Rat!
Three Years with the Rat
Thomas Dunne Books, January 24, 2017
Hardcover and eBook, 288 pages
“Three Years with the Rat is a mind-warping thriller that will make you question reality as you conceive of it. One of the most assured and haunting debuts I’ve read in recent memory.” —Blake Crouch, author of Dark Matter
After several years of drifting between school and go-nowhere jobs, a young man is drawn back into the big city of his youth. The magnet is his beloved older sister, Grace: always smart and charismatic even when she was rebelling, and always his hero. Now she is a promising graduate student in psychophysics and the center of a group of friends who take “Little Brother” into their fold, where he finds camaraderie, romance, and even a decent job.
But it soon becomes clear that things are not well with Grace. Always acerbic, she now veers into sudden rages that are increasingly directed at her adoring boyfriend, John, who is also her fellow researcher. When Grace disappears, and John shortly thereafter, the narrator makes an astonishing discovery in their apartment: a box big enough to crawl inside, a lab rat, and a note that says This is the only way back for us. Soon he embarks on a mission to discover the truth, a pursuit that forces him to question time and space itself, and ultimately toward a perilous confrontation at the very limits of imagination.
This kinetic novel catapults the classic noir plot of a woman gone missing into the twenty-first-century city, where so-called reality crashes into speculative science in a novel reminiscent of Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Jay Hosking's Three Years with the Rat is simultaneously a mind-twisting mystery that plays with the very nature of time and the story of a young man who must face the dangerously destructive forces we all carry within ourselves.
About Jay
Photo by Zoë Miles
Jay Hosking obtained his neuroscience Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia, teaching rats how to gamble and studying the neurobiological basis of choice. At the same time, he also completed a creative writing MFA. His short stories have appeared in The Walrus and Hazlitt, been long-listed for the CBC Canada Writes short story competition, and received an editor’s special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, where he researches decision making and the human brain. He is the author of the novel Three Years with the Rat.
How Jay Hosking used his PhD in neuroscience to write Three Years with the Rat
Author pulled on his various academic backgrounds to pen tale of time and memory
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Jay Hosking has PhD in neuroscience along with an MFA in creative writing.
CONTRIBUTED
Jay Hosking has PhD in neuroscience along with an MFA in creative writing.
By: Sue Carter For Metro Published on Wed Aug 10 2016
Jay Hosking knows a lot about rats. He understands their motivations and behaviour, and what makes their tiny brains tick.
As a neuroscience graduate student at the University of British Columbia, Hosking worked with rodents in a research lab, studying their decision-making skills and teaching them how to gamble. It’s not surprising that his debut novel, Three Years with the Rat, wraps together science, psychology, mystery and yes, a rat.
Set in Toronto, Three Years with the Rat follows a young, aimless man only known as “Little Brother” who moves to the city to be closer to his older sister, Grace, a highly intelligent psychophysics graduate student who appears to be losing her grip on reality.
When Grace goes missing, followed by her boyfriend, John, the narrator discovers a large, handmade wooden box in their apartment, along with a lab rat and a note that says “This is the only way back for us.”
Their disappearance sets the young man into a spiralling adventure, challenging known theories of time and memory.
While Three Years with the Rat could be easily slotted on the speculative-fiction shelf, the book also deals with relationships, both romantic and familial.
Hosking grew up reading classic science fiction, but says he owes more of his writing to the postmodern works of Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami. A self-described arts kid — his grade eight teacher told him, “Whatever you do Jay, don’t go into science” — Hosking did his first degree through Fanshawe College’s music-production program, working for several years in film and television, before deciding to go back to school for neuroscience at the University of Toronto.
“I was a really late starter in terms of science. I came to that because psychology was something I was really interested in, but I wanted something a little meatier or biologically based,” says Hosking, who is now working on his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.
While completing his PhD in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia he started writing fiction, mostly as a means of distraction. “PhDs are pretty demanding,” he says.
“I thought I might go crazy if I kept my head in the lab all the time.” He signed up for a fiction course with author Lee Henderson, jokingly calling himself the class’s “resident weirdo.” Once he finished his PhD, Hosking enrolled in UBC’s creative-writing MFA program, where he is now completing his fourth degree.
Although Three Years with the Rat deals with ambitious, sometimes mind-boggling theories, Hosking’s relatively late start in studying science gives Little Brother’s journey an empathetic edge; readers don’t need a physics degree to follow the story.
“It wasn’t that challenging to remember knowing nothing because I didn’t start my undergraduate until 25,” he says.
It may have taken Hosking a little longer to find his footing in both science and writing, but the timing of his book also couldn’t be better, thanks to the popular Netflix show Stranger Things, which has re-ignited an interest in stories about time and other dimensions. “There’s an amazing discussion happening philosophically in fiction and art,” he says. “It’s a deep well to be drawing from.”
Three Years with the Rat
Publishers Weekly.
263.44 (Oct. 31, 2016): p48.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Three Years with the Rat
Jay Hosking. St. Martin's/Dunne, $25.99 (288p) ISBN 978-1-250-11630-7
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Hosking's smart and spooky debut novel follows an unnamed narrator from the time he moves to Toronto from
Vancouver through the period two years later when his damaged sister, Grace, and her doting boyfriend, John, have
both vanished, possibly into a parallel universe. The narrator--called "Scruffy" by his friend Lee and "Danger" by his
new Tornoto girlfriend--works at an undemanding job that gives him plenty of time to explore the clues left behind by
John and Grace, the latter of whom is a psychologist studying the subjective nature of time. There's a lab rat named
Buddy, a notebook written in code, and most notably, a handmade wooden box, lined on the inside with mirrors, which
takes up most of the couple's second bedroom and has some disturbing effects on those who enter it. Hosking grounds
the fantasy and philosophical speculation firmly in a detailed version of Toronto in the early 21st century, and his plot
bounces nimbly among the three years of the title, answering questions earlier chapters raise while opening up new
ones. The ending pays off all the preceding buildup, pulling narrative strands together with satisfying finesse while
venturing into new territory. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Three Years with the Rat." Publishers Weekly, 31 Oct. 2016, p. 48. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470462493&it=r&asid=8c5d541053cfbf9afd8cac93d054924d.
Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A470462493
7/9/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1499643873994 2/2
Hosking, Jay: THREE YEARS WITH THE RAT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hosking, Jay THREE YEARS WITH THE RAT Thomas Dunne Books (Adult Fiction) $25.99 1, 24 ISBN: 978-1-
250-11630-7
A really gone girl.Hosking's assured debut, a heady mixture of relationship drama and sci-fi time-travel thriller,
features a fascinating character at its center: Grace, a brilliant, erratic, obsessively driven science student who has
suddenly and inexplicably vanished. Our narrator and guide through the resulting narrative tangle, Grace's younger
brother, suffers in comparison to his charismatic sister. A diffident underachiever, he's largely a passive figure in his
own story, tagging along in the wake of his elder sibling's worldly social circle, until his investigation of Grace's
disappearance uncovers her devastating secret--and the shocking actions of her unassuming genius boyfriend, John,
who has rashly meddled with the secret mechanics of the universe itself for his own dark purpose. Structured
anachronistically, Hosking's time-looping tale deftly teases the reader with well-deployed reveals and intrigues with
elegantly limned science-fiction ideas (including the brain-hurting concept of "subjective time" and spooky
otherworldly "hunters" set upon those who temporally trespass). Hosking's prose is limpid and tonally sophisticated;
he's a graceful wordsmith as well as a cerebral idea man. One may wish for more of Grace's defiant, complicated
voice--a version of the story from her point of view might have yielded more surprises and richer rewards--but
Hosking's novel satisfies as both speculative fiction and character study. A potent, sophisticated combination of
science-fiction novel and psychological thriller.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Hosking, Jay: THREE YEARS WITH THE RAT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466329336&it=r&asid=343f0ada0d2b9d8b5dc03f3fe21642e8.
Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466329336
A neuroscientist author blinds readers with science
Jay Hosking’s Three Years With The Rat is unsettling like Paul Auster, complex like David Mitchell—and a bit unwieldy
Adrian Lee
August 6, 2016
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Researcher Natassia Vieira holds a lab rat that is used for stem cells research at the Sao Paulo University Human Genome Research Center in Sao Paulo, Monday, March 3, 2008. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)
Researcher Natassia Vieira holds a lab rat that is used for stem cells research at the Sao Paulo University Human Genome Research Center in Sao Paulo, Monday, March 3, 2008. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)
MAC33_BOOKS_POST03
THREE YEARS WITH THE RAT
By Jay Hosking
It’s generally rare for scientists to become talented writers. This is more than mere anecdotal cliché; research institutions give short or no shrift to anything published beyond scientific journals, and there are few incentives to writing for the general public in clear, interesting ways.
So it is a thrill when a scientist proves them wrong. Enter Jay Hosking, a 36-year-old native of Oshawa, Ont., who contains multitudes: he has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of British Columbia as well as a creative writing M.F.A., and he’s currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard doing research on cognitive decision-making and the human brain. His debut novel, Three Years with the Rat, is a taut work of sci-fi noir with undertones of Paul Auster’s eerie New York Trilogy.
Set in an alternate-reality Toronto, Hosking’s book is a darkly creepy tale of time travel. Its unnamed first-person narrator moves to the city, meets up with his sister, Grace, and her boyfriend, John, then works to unravel the mystery of her abrupt disappearance—and what it has to do with the mysterious, mirror-filled box in the couple’s lab. It’s an ambitious time-hopping story of secret cyphers, sinister revenants and the rat of the title, a freed lab specimen named Buddy who serves as a kind of rodent Virgil.
Rat is written with steel-cold precision, yet it’s suffused with a pervasive sickliness that lends it an unsettling atmosphere. But Hosking’s tonal powers can be draining, and some of the characters’ dialogue is clunky and bloodless—particularly the narrator’s small cadre of indistinguishable friends. The story’s beating heart turns out not to be the narrator’s relationship with his missing sister but rather his quick kinship with John and his affair with Grace’s quotation-happy friend Nicole—which dims the stakes of the book’s central quest, which is to find Grace. And the mystery’s climactic reveal is a bit too sprawling even for Hosking to resolve confidently by the book’s end.
“I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them,” says Albert Camus through Nicole, “I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.” That line gives the mystery its spine, but could just as easily be a criticism of the book. While the scope of Hosking’s ambition is on abundant display here, Three Years with the Rat also asks a lot from its readers, and its plot’s acrobatic complexity and tonal greyness makes the novel ultimately a tad unwieldy. Rats.
Review: Jay Hosking’s Three Years with the Rat is an ambitiously constructed debut novel
MICHAEL HINGSTON
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Aug. 19, 2016 10:50AM EDT
Last updated Friday, Aug. 19, 2016 10:50AM EDT
0 Comments
Print
Title Three Years with the Rat
Author Jay Hosking
Genre fiction
Publisher Hamish Hamilton
Pages 273
Price $32
ISBN 067006937X
Year 2016
I wouldn’t know, living in the proudly rat-free province of Alberta, but apparently, rattus rattus and rattus norvegicus (the common black and Norwegian species, respectively) have their uses. Particularly as research subjects. As John, a grad student in psychophysics and one of the main characters in Jay Hosking’s debut novel, puts it: “Rats are inquisitive, stubborn, resilient. They’re successful, evolutionarily speaking, because they find a way to deal with whatever you throw at them.” Not like those dopey, petite cousins of theirs. “Mice are morons, really.”
Rats have an additional, rather specific advantage in the lab: If you implant special telemetry devices in their stomachs, then shove them into complicated, mirror-enclosed containers, they can be used to test out time travel. At least, that’s what John and his partner, Grace, have discovered – and what Grace’s brother, the narrator of Three Years with the Rat, will spend the next three years trying to reconstruct and then get to the bottom of.
The novel is ambitiously constructed, with each month-spanning section moving slowly backward in time, from 2008, where things are decidedly bleak for our narrator, to 2006, a far sunnier chapter in his life, when he first moves to Toronto and reconnects with Grace and her ragtag group of friends. The narrator is aimless, having dropped out of school three times, and finds comfort in Grace’s social circle – especially the stylish, fiery-haired Nicole, whose bed he quickly falls into.
A lot has changed for these characters in this three-year span, but most importantly is that Grace and John have both disappeared: her at first, and him shortly thereafter. The general feeling is that Grace, at least, has fled the city for personal reasons, and this is not wholly out of step with her usual erratic tendencies. But her brother stumbles into a far stranger explanation when he enters their abandoned apartment, above a pair of sushi restaurants on Bloor Street, and finds a huge, mirror-filled wooden box in their second bedroom, which none of their other friends has ever seen the inside of. Within the box is Buddy, a black-and-white rat, who is unusually eager to return to his cage. He looks like he’s seen some things.
What follows is a fragmented story that leaps across genre, but never fully comes together. Three Years with the Rat begins by teasing us as sci-fi, and Hosking would appear to walk the talk, armed as he is with both a PhD in neuroscience (as his bio puts it, “teaching rats how to gamble and studying the neurobiological basis of choice”) and a creative writing MA. But the novel quickly turns away from the technical realm and becomes, first, a psychological revenge tale, centring on a dead-end street and a traumatic event from Grace’s childhood that is only alluded to, and, ultimately, a fantasy of interdimensional proportions.
The shifting chronology also makes it difficult for readers to get their sea legs. Important information is doled out in pieces, out of reading order, and this is for a plot that’s confusing enough on its own. It doesn’t help that every character suffers from what we might call Lost syndrome: a staunch refusal to clearly explain what they know to everyone else, leading to all kinds of unnecessary miscommunication. The words “time travel,” for instance, appear just twice in the entire book, as an object of Grace’s utter contempt. Instead, she says things such as, “You’re so myopic that you can’t see the operant chamber you’re in, or how everything you do is being quantified and manipulated. You don’t even feel that detached interest scrutinizing your every idiot move.” It’s a miracle her brother is able to figure out the basics of Grace and John’s project, let alone crack a diary John has left behind, written in a knotted, multipart code.
But even if the larger purpose of the box remains opaque to her brother, and to readers, it isn’t to Grace. During their one real conversation on the topic that drives the novel, Grace asks him to imagine the past, present and future, all laid on top of one another. “Imagine you had full access,” she says. “Imagine how much of a comfort it could be. It’s going to be all right. Be proud of yourself. This doesn’t destroy you.” What doesn’t destroy you? her brother asks, exasperated.
But Grace doesn’t have an answer, so the narrator decides to exit this situation and go home to his girlfriend. It’s hard to blame the guy.
Michael Hingston is the author of the novel The Dilettantes and the editor of the Short Story Advent Calendar. He lives in Edmonton.
Three Years with the Rat by Jay Hosking
April 9, 2017
Reviewed by Ian Thomas Shaw
Three Years with the Rat is the type of book that I would normally pass on after stumbling on its implausible plot and suggestion of angst, but the strong voice of the narrator drew me in. Like the metaphorical rat, once in the maze, I persevered until finding an exit, and ended with brief elation my journey with Hosking's unnamed protagonist.
Rat is set in 2006-2008 in the College and Bathhurst neighbourhood of Toronto, then still a bulwark against gentrification. A young man, known occasionally only by his nickname Danger, returns to the City after dropping out of university in Vancouver. His connection with the City is his older sister, Grace, a brilliant young scientist who lives a bohemian life-style with her boyfriend and fellow-scientist, John. In the suburbs lurk their uninspired, dysfunctional parents who play a tangential role in the novel. For Grace, the journey from the suburbs to the City is one to refuge, flight from mediocrity and betrayal, the details of which only slowly and obliquely unfold in the novel.
Rat starts off with the mysterious disappearance of Grace and John. This is not a murder mystery though. Instead, Hosking entertains us with a tinge of alternative reality and a strong dose of the psychology of relationships. A mysterious large wooden box and the presence of lab rats in the missing couple's apartment suggest that somehow their disappearance is related to their scientific research. Danger, a non-scientist, finds himself replicating the box in his determination to find his sister.
Like a maze, Rat's plot takes the reader down various avenues before reaching a dead end and backing up in time and space to find a more likely path. Chapters follow the sequence of the first in the 2008, the second in 2007, the third in 2006, and then the time sequence is repeated. This reverse looping of events alleviates the need to assign backstories to the main characters. Instead, Hoskings shows us the complexity of his characters by gently oscillating the surface of this virtual time sphere.
There is a fair dose of philosophical discourse in Rat. Danger's alluring but demanding girlfriend, Nicole (a.k.a. Trouble) confronts Grace's outward irrationality by accusing her of leading a "solipsist" existence. Danger finds himself increasingly caught between supporting Nicole's insistence of living in the real world and defending his sister's mysterious and volatile actions. Along the way, he uncovers a dark secret in Grace's past. Ostensibly, it would explain much of her current behaviour, but the plot soon takes the reader in another direction, that of an alternate reality. It is unclear at what point in the novel the reader chooses to accept the plot as a metaphor for a mind divorcing from reality or a discovery of the yet-to-be-known.
By sheer coincidence, I started Rat after a recent trip to Toronto where I walked the same streets as Danger, Grace and John do in the novel—College, Bathhurst, Spadina, Bloor, the Kensington Market. This being perhaps my tenth visit to the City in the last four years, the soft core-Torontonian sense of resistance to conformity, the espousal of faint hope that art could bring something a little better to existence than sheer materialism, began to imbue me during that trip. Fate so had it that I was predisposed to the meandering nature of Rat and the immaculately controlled angst in Hosking's writing.
Jay Hosking's background as a neuroscientist serves him well in lending to his debut novel a definite study-of-the-mind quality. While Rat is a strong work of fiction, it is unclear whether Hosking will be able to replicate this success in future works of fiction. For this reason alone, he is a writer to watch.
Three Years with the Rat is published by the Penguin Random House imprint Hamish Hamilton.
Three Years with the Rat
by Jay Hosking
Jay Hosking has an interesting CV for a novelist, with both a PhD in neuroscience and an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Given this hybrid background it’s perhaps not surprising that his debut novel has one foot in the world of science fiction.
SeptemberReviews_ThreeYearsWithTheRat_CoverThe three years of the title are 2006 to 2008, though there are few identifiable historical markers and one of the novel’s themes is the plasticity of time. The narrator is a young man newly arrived in Toronto, where his eccentric scientist sister, Grace, lives with her boyfriend, John. The protagonist soon hooks up with one of Grace’s girlfriends and generally settles into a life of going nowhere. Grace and John, however, are going somewhere. It’s just not clear where. In short, they disappear.
Grace and John exit the novel’s presentation of “objective” time by way of a magic box, following which Grace’s brother, accompanied by a lab rat named Buddy, try to track them down. I say “magic box” because the device in question isn’t very persuasive, even as a facsimile of high tech. Basically an Ikea-style wooden cube fitted with interior mirrors, it more closely resembles a magician’s cabinet or piece of installation art. Buddy the rat even passes in and out of it like a rabbit being pulled from a hat.
This all makes a kind of narrative sense, however. Grace’s inquiries are more philosophical than scientific; indeed, the nature of science itself is one of the subjects up for debate. Is science about building understanding, or discovering truth? Either way, exactly what Grace is up to, and what alternate dimension lies on the other side of the looking glass, seems open to interpretation. We are told by one authority that the solutions are beyond human comprehension, which should be warning enough not to worry about them too much.
Though this aspect of Three Years with the Rat is a puzzle without a solution, the novel is still skilfully developed and catches the imagination. A big reason for this is that the focus remains on figures who are all the more interesting for not being very likeable. Grace, in particular, alienates nearly everyone. Even in the alternate dimension, no one seems to care for her much.
There is probably a message in all of this, relating to the need to pull our heads out of ourselves, the danger of withdrawing into a sense of “subjective time,” or the difficulty of escaping our past (personified in the novel as a hunter tracking characters through the multiverse). But it is the novel’s juxtaposition of clashing wills and personalities, as well as philosophies, that makes it shiver with life.
Reviewer: Alex Good
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Canada
DETAILS
Price: $32
Page Count: 288 pp
Format: Cloth
ISBN: 978-0-67006-937-8
Released: Aug.
Issue Date: September 2016
Categories: Fiction: Novels