He chose a French word he liked and fastened it to a deteriorating building with vintage charm, prioritizing aesthetic over functionality. La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex was born. The building is located in the southern edge of downtown, with abandoned Zorn factories to its west and Chastity Valley to its east. In the early twentieth-century, the building housed factory laborers. The donor selected a darling rabbit wallpaper for the lobby, along with brass rabbit lamps he wished to place in every apartment. Developers eventually vetoed the lamps in favor of updating the building’s water heater. After suffering a few more rejections, the donor stopped trying to influence the design. Now, most tenants of the building call their home by its English translation: the Rabbit Hutch.
As an affordable housing complex, the “Rabbit Hutch” is a thin-walled, rodent-infested, overcrowded and ageing building; the kind of place where everyone knows each other’s business, but no one knows each other’s name. As a novel, The Rabbit Hutch uses this building as a metaphor for the kind of insular and permanently aggrieved society we’ve become; we read this understanding that anywhere there’s overcrowding and sparse resources – whether we’re looking at people or actual rabbits – violence will ensue. Author Tess Gunty has plenty of interesting ideas in here and the writing is of the highest technical quality (this won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2022), but as is my regular personal complaint, Gunty’s MFA is on display throughout: this novel is excellent in the way of many other excellent novels, seemingly rolled right off the MFA printing press. I was impressed but not moved; I’m rounding down to three stars.
On a hot night in apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only eighteen years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen. The agony is sweet, as the mystics promised. It’s like your soul is being stabbed with light, the mystics said, and they were right about that, too. The mystics call this experience the Transverberation of the Heart, or the Seraph's Assault, but no angel appears to Blandine. There is, however, a bioluminescent man in his fifties, glowing like a firefly. He runs to her and yells.
(It’s this “Seraph’s Assault” of the heart that’s depicted on the novel’s cover, so I have to assume that this is a central theme to Gunty; but other than Blandine [arguably the main character in a large cast of characters] having a current obsession with female saints and mystics throughout history, it isn’t otherwise explored.) The Rabbit Hutch, or La Lapinière, of the rusted out industrial town of Vacca Vale, Indiana, houses (among others mentioned in passing) an elderly couple married (somehow) for over six decades, a young couple (who used to engage in loud “Hollywood” sex, and who now have a loud newborn), a middle-aged woman who edits online obituaries, and upstairs in a noisy four bedroom suite (Is that drums? Are those hooves?), four young people who have just aged out of the foster care system; among them the ethereally beautiful and brilliant Blandine of the unfulfilled academic future. Also note that “bioluminescent man in his fifties, glowing like a firefly”, as we get much about his history (and his mother’s), and there are several other offsite characters who are introduced. Although Gunty does use all of her characters to explore some idea about modern society, she casts her net of interest more wide than deep, and as a result, no one character’s storyline was explored to my true satisfaction. (It even bothered me when Blandine talks at length with an old flame about the power imbalance in their relationship in Marxist terms — her body, as a woman, was always ripe for exploitation in our extraction economy — when her current obsession is with the mystics and saints; this truly felt more like the author talking than this character.)
It does all boil down to the disconnection of our society: from the misery of foster care to the person screaming down the hall that nobody checks on – even developers getting their hands on the parkland that had been set aside for Vacca Vale residents in perpetuity – no one seems capable of stepping in or taking a stand. So what’s the cure?
Joan recalls the existence of dogs, craft stores, painkillers, the public library. Cream ribboning through coffee. The scent of the lilacs near her childhood home. Brown sugar on a summer strawberry. Her father's recovery from the tyranny of multigenerational alcoholism. The imperfect but true repossession of his life. The euphoria of the first warmth after winter, the first easy breath after a cold, the return of one's appetite after an anxiety attack. Joan has much to be happy about. She thinks: I am happy, you are happy, we are happy. These thoughts — how she can force herself to have them. Miraculous.
So maybe that’s the knowledge gained by the Seraph’s Assault? Take joy in the little things, for they are miraculous after all? At least there will always be olives and rabbits. So many rabbits. I remain unmoved.
Enjoyed by audiobook while recovering, face down, from retina reattachment eye surgery
