Photo by Monica Robinson
"The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city."
As you can imagine, this novel caught my eye at the mere mention of a run-down Indiana town. Having grown up in a town of exactly 315 residents (according to the 2010 census, at least) in middle-Indiana, surrounded by failing factories and struggling blue-collar families, I was both intrigued by this premise, and admittedly, eager to judge it. And, tldr; it did not fall short of my expectations.
Vacca Vale, though fictional, is a setting that's apt to look incredibly familiar to Midwestern natives, particularly those in crumbling towns that were once minor industrial hubs. Personally, it was refreshing to read a work that hit so close to home, especially when the next best thing is watching "Stranger Things", which, though set in Indiana, was filmed in Atlanta and feels like nothing familiar. I could picture Vacca Vale with an intense accuracy beyond what was simply being described in this already visceral work, and because the physical setting is so vital, this made for an incredibly enthralling read.
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
The Rabbit Hutch is a very cyclical work, to its (at least in my opinion) great credit. The novel begins with what the reader assumes for most of the work is the quintessential murder, rewinds to create the build-up to this pinnacle moment, and then brings us back around with a deeper understanding at the end. It almost prepares the audience for a sadness that never quite occurs, allowing the light tinge of melancholy to simply linger untouched, as it does for most of fictional Vacca Vale's residents and for the reader, too, long after the book itself is closed.
This work is also very self-referential, returning again and again to certain points in a way that shadows them just enough to keep from making these references startlingly obvious, and has a Station Eleven-esque way of flitting from character to character, seemingly unconnected, before letting the audience in on the joke: they were all intertwined all along. Time is very fluid here, too, and while there are days and times mentioned, they are nearly irrelevant to the story as a whole and leaves the reader with the sense of walking through a strange and never-ending dream. To be clear, I fully mean this as a high compliment. While none of this is exactly a new concept in literary fiction, it is a concept I enjoy when done well, as it was here.
One of the major themes of the novel is the idea that there is no such thing as a moral activity, and the subsequent contemplations of moral vs. immoral actions. Again, not a new consideration, but I enjoyed the author's take on it throughout the narrative's journey. The main character strives to right injustice to consider her own existence ethical. A jilted son attempts to validate his hatred of his mother, and the person it has turned him into. A crew of teenage boys lack communication skills in any way that isn't violence, which feels both unsettling and familiar. Nothing is justified, and yet everything is explained, even if the explanation is the very true-to-life result of emotional instability that occurs as the negative emotions build uninhibited and unexamined over time. It is a very human and very relatable way of approaching the existence of this town and its inhabitants.
My one qualm with this work is that it truly isn't anything new. Tess Gunty is an extremely talented writer with a flair for landscape, setting, ambience, moral considerations, and generally weaving together a compelling tale of life and death and everything in-between, but there were some repeated tropes here that felt recycled. Blandine's character, while intriguing, is a textbook manic pixie dream girl archetype. I could have done without the teacher-student relationship, and the idea of paying more attention to one another and the ways our stories intersect has been a hot topic in literary fiction lately as well. Again, I was enthralled with this work from start to finish and read it nearly in a single sitting, but this is entirely due to Gunty's storytelling and encompassing lyricism and not anything to do with the narrative itself.
That said, this is a debut novel and I am excited to see what else Gunty will produce in the future! Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for providing an ARC (though I read it post-release, oops) in exchange for an honest review, and to Tess Gunty for putting more honest literature about the strange and shadowed world that is small-town Indiana into the world! I would recommend this for fans of The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and Everything I Never Told Youby Celeste Ng, as it strikes somewhere in the dead center of where those three oddly intersect.
Pick up your own copy at The Spiral Bookcase! (and support my local indie bookstore and the bookstore which I'm fortunate enough to haunt for actual money every single day)
As a bonus, find welcome to vacca vale, a Rabbit Hutch playlist by yours truly, here.
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