The Rabbit Hutch: A National Book Award Winner

 

THE RABBIT HUTCH (2022)

By Tess Gunty

Alfred A. Knopf, 339 pages.

★★★★★ (National Book Award winner)

 

 

When Pete Buttigieg ran for president, he touted his success as mayor of South Bend, Indiana. It's a good thing The Rabbit Hutch wasn't published until 2022 or we might never have heard of Mayor Pete. Tess Gunty modeled dire Vaca Vale on South Bend.*

 

Vaca Vale is such a grim postindustrial city that it can't even be said that dreams die hard there; it's more as if residents are so hollowed out that they are on autopilot and resigned to their fates. Even the local Catholic Church is described as “gothic on a budget.” Our protagonist Blandine Watkins isn't exactly the sort that Buttigieg was selling either.

 

The namesake “rabbit hutch” is shorthand for the La Lapinière Affordable Housing complex. The latter is a fancy name for a down-market building that's mostly inhabited by social services clients, resource-challenged residents, and those on the margins of mental health. It's also a backdoor reference to the city’s past glories. Vaca Vale once produced Zorn automobiles, but the company went out of business in 1963 and took the  city down with it. (Once, South Bend was home to Studebaker, which ceased production in 1967.)

 

So many revitalization plans have come and gone that few can work up much enthusiasm for Maxwell Pinky’s promise that his project will bring new jobs and tax revenue. In fact, his big announcement is sabotaged in unusual ways. Plus, the city is literally plagued by rabbits that are metaphors for locals: “They look tough, like they knew how to break your legs,” but they are fragile, timid prey.

 

This also describes Blandine to a tee. Her birth name was Tiffany but sexual abuse, dashed hopes, and nervous collapse bred a desire to be dead. She has become a devotee of Hildegard von Bingen, a Christian slave martyred in the 2^nd century. Blandine “loves the mystics because they, unlike her, never stopped searching for portals. They treated prayer as their getaway car, cathedral as a rabbit hole, suffering as a Wonderland... The mystics gave up on the Beyond and they refused to leave the Green World.”

 

Good luck finding a Green World at the rabbit hutch. Gunty’s novel is propelled by interlocking biographies that collide with that of Blandine. She shares a flat with three 19-year-olds–Todd, Malik, and Jack–and they're as damaged as she, but in different ways. Others who drift in and out of the complex or are permanently caged there include: an obituary checker who flags inappropriate comments, a new mother suffering from postpartum depression, a woman whose son is in jail, an elderly couple whose devotion to each other is tested by bad luck, a New Age devotee, an artist faced with the choice of paying her rent or fixing her car to get the money to pay said rent, and a man who likes to strip naked, smear broken glow sticks onto his body, and surprise strangers at night–often by breaking into their homes. Gunty also works a TV sitcom actress into all of this.

 

Detailed backstories flesh out how each character came to their present circumstances. It's a toss-up which is weirder, their journeys or the twisted history of Vaca Vale. Blandine’s travails are at the heart of the book, but the various asides paint lurid backdrops. At times there are so many loose threads awaiting connective knots that we, as readers, get tangled in the mess. In a way, that's the point. Blandine is disturbed by “absence” as she walks across her town. “[T]here is junk everywhere she looks,” but it collectively creates an atmosphere of “nothing.” Her own thoughts are similar. She fancies herself a Marxist and has her postmodern rhetoric down, but when she considers the broken relationship that turned her into Blandine as having gone from a state of primitive communism to feudalism and a final capitalist collapse, she's essentially confessing that she has been a rabbit, not a fox.

 

As you can see, this is a multi-layered novel. What is not and is any sort of endorsement of Buttigieg’s South Bend. In essence, Vaca Vale is filled lots of dead rabbits and mammalian survivors who don't thrive.

 

Rob Weir

 

*Full disclosure: I was in South Bend and found it as depressing as Vaca Vale, but that was more than 20 years ago. Maybe it has gotten better. I hope so!