Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants Book

Yesterday when I came out of my building, I was confronted by a giant rat standing at the bottom of the steps, looking up at me. Yeah, right at me. It was still light out, and the thing just stood there stolidly gazing up, unafraid, just, yeah, looking at me! See, my front yard is infested with large, fearless rats. They live in a hole in the dirt and frolic in the garbage. The hole's recently been plugged up, but the rats don't seem to care; as this book reminds us, they're adaptable animals. I've sat on my stoop on a fine spring day, watching the big rats romp in the yard, climbing into bags of trash and writhing joyously around inside, like the cartoon rat Templeton in that memorable fair scene in the Charlotte's Web movie.

Anyway, this rat yesterday clearly wanted something, and I took its keenly intimidating, beady-eyed stare to mean that it was telling me that I'd better review this book. Since I'm currently on the bus to Philadelphia (INTERNET! On the BUS! I'm like a RAT in a FILTHY REEKING GARBAGE BAG!!!), there's no time like the present.

Okay, so when I was in the first grade, my across-the-street frenemy Lindsay Kagawa had a pet rat named Twinkie. Twinkie was what this book taught me is called a "fancy rat." She was little and delicate and black and white, and she lived in a cage in Lindsay's room. Lindsay and I both loved her rat, and we'd write letters to one another every day, letters that featured drawings of Twinkie engaged in a number of activities (e.g., getting married, doing ballet, holding balloons), letters that were hand delivered into mailboxes and adorned with pencil-drawn stamps featuring portraits of -- who else? -- Twinkie the rat.

In the ninth grade, my friend Isabel Douglass had a fancy rat of her own, named Selene (she also had a zine called Selene, after the rat). Isabel was a forward-thinking young lady, and as you might guess based on the silk-screened "Rent is Theft" tee shirt she wore every day, Selene had no cage, living instead on Isabel's very lovely, if not totally cleanly, person. I remember this being an issue when we'd go eat hot and sour soup at Long Life Veggie House, because restaurant people tended to become upset when Selene poked out, so it was a constant struggle for Isabel to keep her fancy rat concealed at these times. I think Selene eventually ran away from home (as Isabel herself had) to join her gutterpunk rat boyfriend who lived in a sewer. She was replaced by another pet rat -- I want to say Travis? -- but I'm not sure what happened to him. I think he eventually ran off too, to help build up the rat population of Berkeley. If rats don't have cages, they tend to run off. Also, rats are very sensual creatures, according to this book, anyway. Those rats have needs!

Anyway, at the time I looked upon both Twinkie and Selene as adorable little comrades, much to the horror and revulsion of my mother, a woman born and bred -- not incidentally -- on the island of Manhattan. My mother was thoroughly disgusted by the idea of rats as pets, and her hatred of rodents was something I never understood, either as a naive and anthropomorphizing child, or as an annoying anti-anthrocentric teenager. "Rats are cute, mom!" I said. "Rabbits are rodents. What makes rats grosser than rabbits? It doesn't make any sense why you hate them so much!"

"Ugh," she shuddered, and I rolled my eyes.

Then I moved to New York.... and now I get it. Well, I do and I don't. The sight and even the thought of rats is now one of the most disgusting things that I can imagine. When I see them running in the subway tracks or down the street, I watch, transfixed, but I'm also nauseated and repulsed. There is just something so -- revolting, so disturbing about these creatures. Vermin! Ugh!! The larger they are, the more disgusting and scary; the closer they get, the more horrifying, and the idea of large numbers of rats, of bands and tribes, of rats en masse, swarming and scurrying.... UGHH!! Every night when I come home I cross the front yard gingerly, terrified I'll step on one of them. To me rats now represent danger and disease, but there is something more there, deep seated and primal, something Jungian about my feelings towards them that I don't understand. Yeah, rats are gross -- they are filthy animals, they do eat garbage, they do live in sewers, they do bite people, they spread the plague and other diseases (a public health expert in this book calls them "germ elevators") -- but their repulsiveness still seems like more than the sum of their parts. I was hoping this book would explain this to me, or even better, that it would demystify my fear and loathing of the rat. I hoped that I could go back to the days of Twinkie and Selene and become, if not open to having them crawl all over my body, at least more comfortable sharing my space with these creatures who are, quite clearly, not going anywhere anytime soon.

But this book didn't do that. Let's be clear: Rats is a good book, and I learned a lot from it and found it thoroughly enjoyable. But precisely because it was good, I hold it to a higher standard, and I really think Rats needed one more serious, tough, grueling revision in order to become truly great and do some transcendent form of justice to its fascinating subject. Still, it's a worthwhile read, and contains some great New York City history, as well as interesting information about rats.

The premise of the book is that the author decides to spend a year watching rats in an alley in lower Manhattan, while also hanging out with exterminators and researching the history of tenant activism, bubonic plague, Revolutionary War-era Manhattan, and other kinds of obviously and not-so-obviously rat-related information. One thing I loved about this was that both alleys where Sullivan does his rat watching were right around the corner from my office, so I got to check out the locations he was discussing (though I didn't go at night, which is prime rat-watching time). My excitement about the neighborhood sort of made it okay that his rat watching didn't ultimately seem to have much of a point.

Sullivan's book isn't bad, but a lot stuff in here, like the rat watching, is interesting but never seems to go anywhere. I did get annoyed because he started with this sort of Transcendentalist, naturalist conceit about his rat-watching, which would've been great except it took him way too long to get over the silliness or oddness of his project. He should've just thrown himself into it and been like, "I am Thoreau, and this alley is my Walden," but he compromises that idea when halfway through the book he's still exclaiming, "OMG! I can't believe I'm watching rats, this is so crazy!" I know this seems like a minor complaint, but I wanted him to take it seriously from the beginning, and stop congratulating himself for the quirkiness of his idea. Sullivan does eventually give himself over to his topic, but for me it took him a little too long to do it, and once he got there, he didn't quite go far enough in pulling it all together. I think he was trying to say that people are really a lot like rats, but he didn't make that explicit enough, in a way that explained or illuminated our animosity towards them. He came really close, and started to get there at several points, especially at the end, but the book never quite came together and changed the way I thought about rats in a profound way. That's why I say this book needed one more thorough revision to go from great to good -- the elements were all there, but it didn't ever come together as amazingly as I wanted it to.

It did, however, make me think quite a lot about rats, something that's really been a problem because I've recently been running a lot, and seeing things move out of the corner of my eye has led to a lot of embarrassing screeching and sideways leaps into the air (it's always turned out to be a bird or a plastic bag -- knock wood). Rats were always on my mind while I was reading this, and I'm definitely more conscious now of their presence all around me, at all times -- ugh. I've always been grossed out by the heaps of garbage coating New York, especially during the summer, and I'm now even more disturbed by them. Gross! When we surround ourselves with garbage, we get the rats that we deserve....

Living in New York does make me feel like a rat, especially when I'm riding the train at rush hour. For years, that old Fear line about "rats in our cage" has scurried through my brain as I swarm out through the station and cram myself into packed cars. The problem with this book was that it validated this feeling without adding much to it. There are a few great moments -- as when, at the beginning, Sullivan compares the efficiency of a rat poison bait station to fast food restaurants -- but not much that's revelatory. Still, if you're interested in vermin or in New York City social history, I do recommend reading this book. It took me awhile to get through because I like to read while I'm eating, and that just wasn't an option here.... still, it was great on the subway. Rats is, despite my whining, enjoyable, informative, and not a waste of time at all.