The Rabbit Hutch is set in a post industrial mid- western town, and the hutch is a cheap housing block where residents are piled on top of each other like battery hens. Beyond the suburbs a natural valley filled with cotton tail rabbits is about to be redeveloped by out of town businessmen who offer meaningless reassurances about the environmental sustainability of their plans. This simple juxtaposition on the theme of rabbits is at the heart of a novel about loss of innocence and a failure to care.
Tiffany, aka Blandine, the main protagonist, is a gifted child who has been moved through a series of foster homes and now shares a flat in the Rabbit Hutch with three young men from similar backgrounds. All of them have been damaged by a lack of parental care.
Other residents include a mother who can’t bond with her baby – even looking into its eyes gives her the heeby-jeebies. Then there is an old couple talking about their children. The woman is unhappy and complains to her husband that the kids didn’t turn out right: we should have done something different – piano lessons or barefoot dancing or something. In both cases supportive husbands try to help the women accept that they love their child the best they can. Then there is Joan who monitors comments on an obituary website, deleting criticisms so that the dead are always seen in the best light. When she fails to remove a negative comment about a film star who has recently died, she finds herself in her boss’s office being reminded of her responsibilities. Joan tries to explain that the criticism was posted by the star’s only son: surely he has the right to have a voice? No – it can’t be allowed to stay, and so she deletes the comment again.
But the son, Moses, is absolutely right. We get to see the story from his point of view, and realise that his mother was incapable of loving him. He was mistreated and neglected. She was fickle in love, drank unwisely and was incapable of maternal feelings. The boy has spent his life on a psychiatrist’s couch, and is determined the truth should be known. When he discovers that Joan has deleted his comment again, he leaves the coast, boards a plane and heads to the mid west to sort things out.
Back to Blandine, whose academic gifts promised an exciting future until her education was derailed by an encounter with an abusive teacher. Now she roams the valley, watching the cottontail rabbits and the birds, enjoying the beauty of god’s green world. She reads the works of Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval visionary, and attends town council meetings where white businessmen pretend to have meaningful democratic consultations about their building plans, but she knows it’s all for show. Nothing will be changed, and the environmental protections they promise to instal at a later stage will never materialise.e
The denouement of The Rabbit Hutch brings these characters together in a dramatic and compassionate climax when Blandine takes home a lame goat she finds caught in a thorn bush down in the valley. Unfortunately she does not realise the boys she is sharing a flat with have begun slaughtering the mice they catch in traps, and are looking for bigger fish to fry. When she returns from the pet shop carrying what she needs to care for the animal, she stumbles on the boys, knives in hand. Meanwhile the old man has decided to return the dead mice Blandine’s flatmates keep dropping from the balcony above, and Moses, dressed in black clothes wildly decorated with luminous paint, is wandering about the Rabbit Hutch looking for Joan, and seeking revenge.
The Rabbit Hutch is a multilayered, ambitious and compassionate novel. Apart from the business men, who are only ciphers, the characters are well rounded, flawed and imperfect. The events are shocking at times, as the writer explores the consequences of emotional and economic poverty. But this is not a rust belt novel like Russo’s. Gunty is more surreal. Her imagination is given free rein and she uses different genres – biographies, letters, blogs, lists, cartoons, below the line comments – to give broader perspectives and points of view, so the book seems more like a collage than a coherent vision. In this sense she uses post- modern narrative approaches to great effect. The variety this adds, and the writer’s comic but sympathetic vision, and elusive use of symbolism, make The Rabbit Hutch one of the best books I have read this year.
Senior Reader 