ONE'S COMPANY

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.