The Rabbit Hutch is an affordable housing complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana, a post-industrial city deep in the US’s Rust Belt. In apartment C12 an ageing logger scrolls through his one-star date ratings. “This man is a tater tot,” reads one comment. In C2, a lonely woman whose job is screening online obituary comments for “foul language” or “mean-spirited remarks” about the deceased chooses to ignore the disturbing sounds beneath her in C4, an apartment shared by three teenage boys and a strange and mesmerising teenage girl obsessed with female mystics, all of whom aged out of the foster care system on their 18th birthdays. In C6 a couple in their 70s deliberate on whether they should put a dead mouse in a trap outside the door of the young couple upstairs.
The Rabbit Hutch complex provides a metaphor for the narrative architecture of Tess Gunty’s original and incisive debut. Chapters are told by different characters in disparate forms and media, the stories interlinked through Blandine, one of the teenagers in C4. Born to an addicted mother, she has been shuffled through a series of foster homes. She is a polymath, intensely bright and curious but her education veered off course after the attentions of a music teacher. Blandine provides devastating, funny commentary on everything from literature and the environment to social media, gendered power dynamics and late capitalism.
When Blandine meets the woman from C4 in a laundromat at the start of the novel, she tells her, “We’re all just sleepwalking. Can I tell you something, Jane? I want to wake up. That’s my dream: to wake up.” Gunty shows us how we are sleepwalking, living in a distorted hyperreality where the real is replaced with its representations, “everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile searching for proof that they’re loveable”. And while individuals sacrifice their realities to “algorithmic predators of late capitalism”, around us our environments are being destroyed.
Unlifelike life
In its efforts to revitalise itself, Vacca Vale is in the process of destroying a 500-acre park created during the 1918 pandemic, imagining that it will draw tech companies. “I want a life that’s a little more like life,” says Blandine to one of the other teenagers in her apartment who watches the tourism commercials about Vacca Vale’s revitalisation on his laptop over and over again and cries, the commercials riffing on concepts of home, something he has never known.
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Vacca Vale ranks first in Newsweek’s annual list of Dying American Cities. Gunty’s hometown of South Bend, Indiana, has also made the list and the story of Vacca Vale’s downturn not only echoes South Bend’s but countless other automobile cities in the Rust Belt. In Vacca Vale, the fictional Zorn Automobile Company poisoned the water supply with Benzene before they bankrupted the economy and took away pensions and insurance. “Zorn mutated the people” it was leaving behind, economically, psychologically and physically. “Zorn was why you saw your dad cry. Zorn was why you didn’t have a dad. Why he overdosed or dealt.”
Indiana’s state motto is Vacca Vale’s: The Crossroads of America, the slogan emblematic of both a geographical and historical crux, the juncture we find ourselves at right now. The acres of Indiana’s green corn and soybean crops mask the dust and drought. “This future is already materializing, and so now, when the land can sprout nothing else, it sprouts suburbia.” And the suburbia we have built is anti-pedestrian and pro-car. Sidewalks end where strip malls begin, their architecture cheap and “built to be temporary”.
This is an important American novel, a portrait of a dying city and, by extension, a dying system. Its propulsive power is not only in its insight and wit, but in the story of this ethereal girl who has been brutalised by a system over and over again and yet keeps trying to resolve and save it. She is so vibrantly alive and awake that when I finished this book, I wanted to feel that. I wanted to walk outside. I wanted what is real. I wanted to wake up. Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is breathtaking, compassionate and spectacular.
