The Rabbit Hutch

“You could be persuaded you’d never seen her before, even if you passed her daily. You could be persuaded you saw her every day, even if you’d never passed her before.[…] She could be your neighbor. She could be your relative. She could be anyone.”

Gunty adopts the second-person singular tense to highlight the near-universal experience of passing a nondescript person who is nevertheless familiar. Blandine and Joan live in the same building, but Blandine has the sensation that Joan could be “anyone.” This describes the alienation and loneliness at the heart of modern living, as people living close by can be relative strangers.

“We are interconnected and interdependent, no matter how fiercely narcissism reigns.”

This quote from Elsie Blitz’s self-authored obituary underpins the novel’s thesis, as Gunty aims to show how one cannot live without impacting the lives of others. The quote is referred to by other characters throughout the book. Ironically, Elsie failed to recognize how her life was interdependent with her son Moses’s, as she was self-obsessed and neglectful.

“That’s when the love attacked me, Todd, and Malik for real. All at once. Synchronized. We were three teenage guys hot out of the Vacca Vale foster system, living on our own for the first time, and we believed we were free until that winter morning. I think Malik fell for Blandine the hardest, and Todd the softest, and me in the middle.”

This quote, written from Jack’s perspective, establishes the pattern of mimetic desire within Apartment C4, as the three boys imitate, reflect, and magnify each other’s love for Blandine. The comparison of how hard they each fall for Blandine sets up a sense of competition and mutual vigilance between the three boys. The fact that Jack experiences love as an attack resonates with the violence he will later enact on Blandine.

“Blandine does not enjoy lugging around the secrets of strangers. She wants to transcend herself, wants to crawl out of the grotesque receptacle of her body. How can she accomplish such as thing when strangers treat her as a storage unit for their heaviest information?”

Blandine resents the way her customers at the café confide in her and thinks that their loaded information will get in the way of her accomplishing her mystical goal of exiting her body. Her perception of her body as a “grotesque receptacle” indicates the mind-body dualism she has inherited from being steeped in Catholicism, and she feels that she must be redeemed by ceasing to exist in her current form. Arguably, as she has little control over how strangers respond to her body, her wish to exit it stems from a desire to regain a feeling of autonomy.

“He had never heard of Vacca Vale before […] but he likes to visit Middle America, likes to investigate and report back to the coasts. Their churches and their supermarket smiles. Their canned corn, which travels thousands of miles before returning to the land that produced it. Their American flags in the yards, their minivans and Christian schools. […] The faith and anger and geometry. All highways and God. Moses only understands contemporary politics when he’s in the Midwest.”

Prior to visiting, Moses has a typical coastal resident’s condescending view of Vacca Vale. He lumps the town in with “middle America,” a clichéd term that is more idea than reality, and judges that it is a backward place and devoid of cynicism given the presence of Catholicism and American flags. However, the allusion to homegrown corn that travels thousands of miles to be packaged also indicates a comic inefficiency in the place. Still, he cannot deny the zone’s status around election time given that it is a swing state. He imagines that he will go there like an old-fashioned anthropologist and report back on this strange species he imagines to be so different from him.

“In this equation, the variable of Y could be a producer, a gas station manager, the Sun King. […] X could be his employee, his stepdaughter, a wild plot of land, but he must believe that X is his. […] It has happened before—in rental video stores, churches, and meat lockers. It will happen again.”

The introduction of Yager and Tiffany’s affair through the metaphor of a common equation with different variables indicates both Gunty’s and the characters’ consciousness of entering a preformed script. Gunty’s listing of the numerous roles that X and Y could take references both famous and banal examples: a producer like the notorious Harvey Weinstein or the Sun King, Louis XIV. The idea that this story has happened before and will happen again gives it an inexorable appeal and makes both James and Tiffany feel helpless when they are unable to resist it.

“He looked undressed, but he did not look nude until he removed his glasses and placed them, gingerly, on a nightstand. Confronting his naked, endangered face for the first time was like seeing a tiger at the zoo, subdued and therefore doomed, and it sent a shock of pity through her, made her want to look away but also save his life.”

This passage reveals the tenderness that Blandine feels for James as they prepare to make love. The evocation of a “naked, endangered face,” as though it is a much-hunted animal, indicates her attraction to his vulnerability and her resulting “shock of pity” bonds her to him in an extreme way. The fact that she wants to look away indicates how overpowered she is in the moment and how she seeks control. Ultimately, her wish to save his life indicates that she is devoted to him.

“The moment Blandine felt most alive, she was nothing but a variable. The rage shovels her out of herself, like it’s mining her for something to burn.”

Here, at the end of the description of the love affair, Gunty returns us to the metaphor of the equation with two variables. The idea of feeling like “nothing but a variable” speaks to the devaluation of the affair as it fits into so many clichés like it. However, the feeling of being alive and her resulting rage are real and belong to her. The anthropomorphosis of rage, which seems to act beyond her in wanting something to burn, indicates her out-of-control feelings and her search for a channel for her anger.

“Todd pounced like a cat, slamming the shoe over the little guy’s body in one fluid motion. Then again, and again. Then over and over, harder and harder, grunting, until all we could see was a little bloody pulp on the floor. I squinted. Smallest foot I ever saw in a heap of red, twitching.”

Jack and Malik watch Todd carry out their mandate to kill a baby mouse. Although Todd was reluctant to kill the mouse, his movements have a precise yet insistent violence. Gunty juxtaposes the simile of pouncing like a graceful cat with the hard labor of crushing a life out of existence. The repetition of the epithet “little” indicates the boys’ sympathy for the life they are taking away. The final detail of the smallest foot Jack has ever seen indicates the outsized nature of the violence inflicted on the helpless creature, while the twitching shows the mouse’s final desire to live.

“Because they were American and because they were a dream, Zorn Automobiles could not last forever. Finally, Zorn Automobiles declared bankruptcy. They were wagons, buggies, carriages, automobiles, and then, after about a hundred years of supremacy, Zorn was nothing at all.”

Gunty overturns the American dream of boundless prosperity by splitting the words American dream into two clauses and inserting the word “because” before each. The list of vehicles, each more technologically advanced than the last, concretely describes the company’s evolution before its spectacular decline. The phrase “a hundred years of supremacy” likens it to a faded empire.

“I used to think all relationships were imaginary […] but now that I’m dying, I see the consequences, I see people existing outside my mind, making decisions, making dents. I see you — my Moses, my sweet angel boy. […] I see how I’ve ruined you.”

While self-involved, pampered Elsie experienced other people and their thoughts and motivations as somehow unreal and unaffected by her, she begins to see the consequences of her actions in her last months of life. She sees especially how her actions have spoiled her son. This extends Elsie’s sentiment that all lives are interconnected and expresses a poignant moment of enlightenment when it is far too late.

“Suddenly, she finds it unbelievable that they have shared a shower for a year. As they look at each other, warmth blossoms inside her, and her pulse quickens, and she feels like an idiot. With a ferocity that commandeers her entire body, she longs to take his hand and guide him into the bedroom, under her dress, into some kind of future, a future of his hand on her knee at the cinema, boiling pasta, waking up and describing their dreams. She longs to sleep in for the rest of her life.”

Blandine’s attraction to Jack takes her by surprise, as it is so sudden. Her reference to not being able to believe they have shared the same shower for a year illustrates this as she goes from viewing him as a platonic nobody to someone she might be interested in. The physical symptoms of warmth and a quickening pulse take over her body and in some ways point toward an out-of-body experience as they take her out of the present moment and into an imagined future where they have a happy sexual and domestic life together. The longing to “sleep in for the rest of her life” indicates her wish for connection and escape.

“The color of the water was the color of nothing, and it was as though the nothing that always haunted Vacca Vale had materialized into physical substance, one capable of quantifiable damage. The river was everywhere, contaminating the city with itself, insisting that there was no real difference between it and them.”

This passage describes the nature of the flood a few months earlier when the river overtook the city. The “nothing” color of the water is a metaphor for this post-industrial town’s lack of identity, while the state of flooding indicates its lack of direction as it is suspended in time and space. The anthropomorphized river’s insistence that Vacca Vale’s inhabitants are no different from it indicates that suspension in time is the town’s natural state.

“Vacca Vale is a city designed for cars, not for people, but Blandine hopes that she can force it to become walkable by inventing and asserting her pedestrian rights on a regular basis. The architecture is cheap, strictly utilitarian and built to be temporary.”

The notion that Vacca Vale is designed for cars rather than people exposes Zorn’s long shadow in the town; despite no longer being present, the town caters more to the defunct factory’s inventions than the people who inhabit it. The disposable, “strictly utilitarian” nature of the architecture also dehumanizes the town’s inhabitants, as their desire for pleasure and beauty is overlooked. Blandine’s insistent walking becomes a one-woman manifestation against the inevitable.

“She follows a dirt path to a meadow, woods thick and noisy around her, and she can feel her whole body relax as she descends into greenery, into a place that has not yet been fucked.”

Blandine experiences healing and hopefulness in nature, as the thick woods insulate her from the troubles of the town by providing a distraction in their own natural noises. The idea of a place that “has not yet been fucked” forms a visceral contrast with the natural description and indicates the precariousness of the space, which is now threatened by developers who will put a nasty, human imprint on it.

“I wanted all the extremes at once: I wanted to die, kill, fuck, find my parents and bring them back to life and kill them, then bury them and yell and yell. For the first and probably last time in my life, I envied women for being able to give birth. I wanted to fuse myself to somebody else. I wanted to know what it would take for me to give a damn.”

Jack describes a desire for a similar out-of-body experience to Blandine in wanting all the extremes at once. However, many of his desires are violent, as occurs with those who have been socialized as men. His wish to experience the fusion of beings that occurs in childbirth shows how he longs for a purpose in his life, especially when he is dangerously close to veering into indifference.

“James takes it without asking, his hand brushing her electrically. She feels angry, and sweaty, and delighted that he’s putting his mouth where she put her mouth. She feels like she’s about to throw up, undress, sprout wings.”

The simple action of James taking the vaporizer that Blandine just used produces an effect that would be similar to actual touch. The repetition of his mouth where she put her own is tantamount to a kiss, while the actions of vomiting, undressing, and sprouting wings—delivered as three imperative verbs—indicates that she is experiencing her body as multiple and rapidly approaching an ecstatic state. Here, Gunty shows how physical stimuli can approximate what Blandine desires to feel spiritually.

“We were not two people simply succumbing to inconvenient, taboo, totally hackneyed attraction. We were cogs in a superstructure of class and state and production and distribution and legislation and political pyramids and militias and exchange rates and national debts and fossil fuels and stuff. We were stuck in a web of material relations.”

Blandine’s explanation of her affair with James aligns with the book’s notion that the macro and micro are interconnected. Theirs was not a “hackneyed” love story, Blandine claims. Instead, it was linked to a larger chain of material relations, as they were drawn to each other as a product of the injustices in the world. It is as though they did not have the power to stop it.

“Is Joan some kind of defector of the Sisterhood if she doesn’t investigate? It’s late. She’s exhausted and afraid. She looks at the jar of maraschino cherries waiting on her nightstand. She hasn’t eaten one yet. The cherries were supposed to be delightful, but now they’re just accouterments to phonic misery”

When Joan hears Blandine’s screams from the apartment above, her feelings of guilt and responsibility towards the girl mingle with others of self-preservation. The short sentences expose Joan’s snappy mood and indicate that she has reached the end of her patience. However, she cannot take comfort in the maraschino cherries that were the pleasure of her solitary life anymore. This indicates Joan’s increasing feelings of interconnectedness and her realization that there is no personal happiness while others are being harmed.

“Why do you have to kill everything, she screamed. Why do you have to kill everything.”

When Blandine catches the boys on the cusp of sacrificing the goat, she charges them with the accusation that they try to kill everything they see. The repetition of her accusation symbolizes that she is not just addressing them, but men in general.

“The glowing man ran across the room, to Blandine. Nothing was real for nineteen years and then. Todd vomited. The goat peed. The body bled. I looked around and tried to see. An old man appeared in the doorway. Horror on his face. But he was gone as soon as I saw him.”

While Jack has spent 19 years of his life in a state of unreality, the proceedings on the night of Blandine’s sacrifice affect him viscerally. Gunty uses a succession of verbs relating to bodily functions to emphasize the scene’s apocalyptic drama. The mysterious glowing man who runs to Blandine’s aid emphasizes the mystical aura of the night and indicates that Jack does not feel in control of events.

“Insignificant earthly creature! Though as a woman you are uneducated in any doctrine of fleshly teachers in order to read writings with the understanding of the philosophers, nevertheless you are touched by my light, which touches your inner being with fire like the burning sun. Shout and tell!”

This passage from a chapter titled “Hildegard” is in the mystic’s original language. It conveys the message that the voice imparts to the mystic in her out-of-body experience and thus parallels Blandine’s experience when she loses consciousness and feels that she has achieved her ambition of leaving her body. The experience of being touched with divine light and having one’s inner fire acknowledged is a triumphant one. Through the imperative command, the mystic is given the confidence to speak her message loudly.

“Since she has learned of the stabbing, Joan Kowalski has not slept or attended work, tormented by visions of a slashed belly. She had a fever that would not validate itself via thermometers. In the visions, it’s almost always a child’s belly, sometimes a kitten’s.”

Joan is affected by visions of an afflicted Blandine, indicating that her character has developed from a solid, solitary one to one that is far more permeable. The slashed belly of a kitten or child indicates her belief in Blandine’s vulnerability and innocence, and she is haunted by the injustice wrought on this helpless girl.