BOOK REVIEW: Debut tale dives down bleak rabbit hole of life in dying US city
“On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only 18, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen.”
Thus begins Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch. This sweeping debut novel set in a low-income housing community in Indiana has won the 2022 National Book Award for fiction, one of the US’s most prestigious prizes for literature.
In her acceptance speech on November 16, Gunty cited recent comments made by poetry nominee Sharon Olds about literature’s essential role in society. She called books a path to calling attention to people “neglected” and otherwise not visible.
“Attention is the most sacred resource we have on this planet,” she said, saying that books are among the last places “where we spend the resource freely and where it means the most”.
How do you live in a dying city? That’s the question at the heart of her bizarre, disturbing and often funny novel. The story takes place over a single week, delving into the bleak existence of young people who yearn for a better life than what the system has dealt them.
The title refers to a dilapidated apartment building in a dying Rust Belt town.
The Rabbit Hutch (its actual name is La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex) is in the fictional city of Vacca Vale, Indiana — a relic of a place that, having outlived its usefulness to the motor industry, has been left to decay. Its one-time success is now a distant memory. Nothing but a scattering of incongruously grand Victorian homes and a poisoned water table remain as testimony to the glory days of the Zorn car company.
Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is ageing and stuck. C8 harbours an extraordinary fear. C4 is of particular interest. It’s where four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster-care system live: three boys and a girl, Blandine.
Women mystics
Exceptionally beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by the structures, people and places that not only failed her but harmed her. Now all she wants is an escape.
Fascinated by the early Christian women mystics that she reads about, particularly Hildegard of Bingen, Blandine fantasises about a mystical experience that might allow her to break away from her terrestrial existence, at least for a little while. Fictional though Zorn and Vacca Vale may be, they are easily recognisable as symbols of the malaise of the US’s postindustrial heartlands.
The novel opens with an epigraph from Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger & Me, about the degradation of Flint, Michigan, after the withdrawal of General Motors. It’s about rabbits, and was spoken by Rhonda Britton, who was nicknamed “the bunny lady” after her appearance in the film. “If you don’t sell them as pets, you got to get rid of them as meat … If you don’t have 10 separate cages for them, then they start fighting. Then the males castrate the other males. They do. They chew their balls right off.”
Imagine then what happens to a fraught bunch of people packed into one rabbit hutch. Gunty observes a number of them. An elderly bickering couple, a pathetic sixtysomething man who resents women with “an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument”, a young mother who is terrified by her baby’s eyes.
Trapped, lonely and ignored, many of the residents of the Rabbit Hutch have never set foot outside town, some imagining their physical bodies inextricably linked to the fate of Vacca Vale. They soon discover, over the course of a few days, that they are also inextricably linked to one another.
Extreme violence
Gunty’s novel culminates in an explosive act of violence so extreme that she chooses to illustrate it, literally, with black-and-white drawings that require readers to fill in the horrifying blanks for themselves.
This kind of violence, which the narrative hints at from the start, against both people and animals, and either physical or emotional, lurks behind closed doors everywhere in Vacca Vale. As shocking and awful as the culminating violence might be, it’s not exactly surprising.
Despite the disillusion and despair of its people, there is a hint of hope in a proposed new development that might change the lives of Vacca Vale’s residents for the better.
Beautifully written and intensely moving, The Rabbit Hutch closes with a reminder that human connection and kindness can thrive despite the worst of circumstances.