2023-07-08 12:12:41
In another time, which also didn’t pay its bills, cars were built here; now the factory is empty and covered in graffiti. You’d think half of Tess Gunty’s book was on the battered wall: “Someone painted BLUE LIVES MATTER over BLACK LIVES MATTER. Someone else wrote ALL LIVES MATTER about both of them.”
Such a palimpsest is characteristic of Gunty’s first novel, The Rabbit Hutch, which won the prestigious National Book Award. In the greatest possible concentration, the factory wall lists a social, a communicative, an economic and a planetary upheaval. Not many debuts have inspired such ambition since Zadie Smith or David Foster Wallace. Because Tess Gunty is not content with brave convictions or elaborate identities. She has written a great social novel – a form that is simply called “social novel” in her American homeland.
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So it’s no coincidence that the title literally means social housing. “Rabbit Hutch” is how the La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex is called in the fictional Vacca Vale, Indiana, a “supposed dying town” in the so-called Rust Belt of the United States. The dream companions of the invented brand Zorn were once built in Vacca Vale, what remains are the many unemployed and the many rabbits on the industrial wastelands, the boarded-up shops, the ubiquitous drugs and here and there some very unequally distributed old money.
Now they want to counter the misery with a “revitalization plan”: where benzene used to be piped into the river, start-ups are now to be created, for which, of course, the beautiful park is to be removed first. It is home to the rabbits that are the leitmotif of this novel, and also the favorite haunt of Blandine Watkins, who is both Tess Gunty’s Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit. As a child in the welfare system, Blandine was desperately looking for another world, now, at 17, as a gifted school dropout, she has relied on the mysticism of Hildegard von Bingen, who believed in the “transverberation of the heart”.
Digital Naturalism
In fact, Tess Gunty begins her novel by announcing that Blandine is going to “leave” her body. One can’t shake the suspicion that The Rabbit Hutch is counting down to a crime. Tess Gunty’s ambitions certainly include plot and suspense: everything is heading towards a hot July night, which takes an outrageous turn in apartment C4.
Blandine lives in C4 with three boys who also come from welfare, in C2 lives the forty-year-old Joan, for whom the future of Vacca Vale has already begun, at least professionally. In any case, Joan has a bullshit job such as the Internet age alone can produce. At “Restinpeace”, a portal for online obituaries, she has to moderate the comment area called the book of condolences, which naturally turns the “rabbit hutch” into a media novel.
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A 1950s child star wrote her obituary on “Restinpeace” while she was alive, whereupon her estranged son berates her in the comments and, as she deletes his tirade, begins to stalk poor Joan too – although, or perhaps because, this man ” almost impossible to be interested in people he meets in the so-called real world”.
what the devil knows
What sounds constructed could actually be something like a new, digital naturalism: in this novel, the internet overwhelms everyone; madness dwells alone in his disembodied world, and the digital rabbit hole is the only one the clever Blandine avoids in her desperate search for an otherworld. She doesn’t even own a mobile phone, but her unacknowledged longing for authentic creatureliness is all the greater.
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As she seeks to transcend her body, they are drawn to Vacca Vale’s natural beings: the rich man’s dogs her roommate walks; the goats that are supposed to keep the grass short in the park; and of course the rabbits, which one encounters so often in the novel until it becomes undeniable that actually all of them in the novel, if not rabbits, are then above all creatures, albeit unfortunately those with 5G cell phones.
“You think rabbits are quiet animals,” says one of Blandine’s roommates, “until you try to kill one. They squeal like the devil.” But the devil also appears in one of the mystery plays by Hildegard von Bingen, which Blandine takes to heart in the threatened park’s white clover. While the personified soul sings about God and creation, the devil has to roar out what is at the heart of this novel: “Because none of you know what you actually are!”
Tess Gunty: “The Rabbit Hutch”. Translated from the English by Sophie Zeitz. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 416 pages, 25 euros.
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