Close quarters

The ecstatic mingles with the banal in a riveting debut about love and cruelty in an apartment block in rust-belt Indiana

‘On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only 18, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen,” begins The Rabbit Hutch. “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 50s.”

Debut author Tess Gunty can nail an opening. What happens next is the gradual, chronologyhopping revelation of who Blandine is, how a glowing middle-aged male got involved, and why so many human lives (and one goat) have converged on this one horrible moment.

The main setting is the Rabbit Hutch, the apartment block where Blandine exits her body. La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana, has outlived its usefulness to the motor industry and has been left to decay. A scattering of incongruously grand buildings remains as testimony to the glory days of the Zorn automobile company.

Zorn is an invention, and so is Vacca Vale, but the broad details are recognisable to anyone who knows a little about the malaise of America’s post-industrial heartlands. The novel opens with an epigraph from Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger & Me, about Flint, Michigan, after the withdrawal of General Motors.

The epigraph about rabbits is spoken by Rhonda Britton, nicknamed “the bunny lady” after her appearance in the film. “If you don’t sell them as pets, you got to get rid of them as meat … If you don’t have 10 separate cages for them, then they start fighting. Then the males castrate the other males … They chew their balls right off.”

If that’s what happens to rabbits in a rabbit hutch, what’s the result when you pack humans into one? Gunty travels through the fraught consciousnesses that occupy the housing complex. The elderly bickering couple; the sad-sack sixtysomething man who resents women; the young mother who is terrified by her baby’s eyes.

These are lives lived too close for comfort and too remotely for care. The

novel is populated by people who both seek love and feel it as a terrible imposition.

That’s even more the case when you’re a woman, with a body that’s made to be occupied. A pregnant woman imagines herself as a building and the foetus inside her as a developer: “Room by room, he demolished her body and rebuilt it into his own.” Blandine rails against the female condition and dreams of making her escape.

This is a novel that is almost over-blessed with ideas. Gunty doesn’t quite balance the pieces of her story – she has a winning impulse for digression, but she also seems anxious that you might forget Blandine. The insistent nudges back to the main arc stop her novel creating the invisible clockwork that would make it perfectly satisfying.

At its best, The Rabbit Hutch balances the banal and the ecstatic in a way that made me think of prime David Foster Wallace. It’s a story of love, told without sentimentality; a story of cruelty, told without gratuitousness. Gunty is a captivating writer, and if she learns to trust her talent, whatever comes next will be even better. SARAH DITUM WRITES ABOUT POLITICS, CULTURE AND LIFESTYLE