Review of The Rabbit Hutch

 

Blog 42

Though I still read novels to be educated, at this point in my life, the tilt is toward the element of entertainment. I want, above all, to enjoy the story I’m reading. With that in mind, though I still read literary novels (a personal requirement), I have less patience if the one I’m reading turns into a slog.

I recently completed Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch, a highly regarded 2022 release. Set in and around an apartment building in a moribund, rust belt Indiana town, time and circumstances (among them, loss of a single industry) have left the town and its occupants behind, adrift and forgotten. The dislocation of the younger adults without educations through which to advance, but still needing to find a path to a life of purpose, now idling, amusing themselves with terraced cruelty stands in contrast to the aloneness (more than loneliness) of the older adults with their peculiarities and proclivities that could slip into madness.

Through it all is Blandine, a preternaturally intelligent, seventeen-year-old, knowledgeable beyond her years, beyond the other characters, yet damaged by institutional failure, i.e. a foster care child now aged out of the system. Her planned escape from her body (from life?) culminates in insulting to rage a shy, emotionally underdeveloped boy to try to kill her – suicide by inviting murder. That she survives offers a (tiny) glimmer of hope.

My sense is that the author is sympathetic toward the plight of these characters abandoned by society and circumstance, to the waste of lost potential and what can befall individuals not part of or connected to a system, toward those institutionally failed, left to disconnected lives of loneliness without clear purpose or a sense of options, particularly the young, thrust into the world unprepared for independence and without support.

I came to this book, as I do all fiction, hopeful for a story that would filter in and linger like the aroma of warm bread. Rather, I closed the book upon completion, thinking, “What was that?” Rather than the lift of just-baked bread, a weight sat upon me like regret.

Perhaps (probably) the problem (fault, failure), if that’s what it is, lies with me. I may lack the analytic skill to appreciate, more fully, the author’s intent. In the end, I did not find myself identifying with or, more importantly, pulling for any of the characters, not even Blandine. But then, maybe that was, at least in part, Gunty’s point – not enough of us do root for the dispossessed, manifesting concern about vitalizing (or revitalizing) their lives.           

If you happen to read The Rabbit Hutch, and respond differently, please guide me to what I missed.