Talking Big

By Jay Innis Murray

“And what is your relation to her?” an Intensive Care Unit receptionist asks a visitor in the last chapter of Tess Gunty’s ambitious and perceptive debut novel The Rabbit Hutch. It’s a question everybody’s been asked by hospital staff, but here is something more, as the question (What Is Your Relation?) also makes up the title of that closing chapter. What is your relation to the people you encounter? What is your obligation to them? Are you attentive enough to them to recognize them? The chapter heading is a thematic summing up for the book, and it will settle after you revisit the book’s tour de force opening (first thing this reviewer did), armed with everything you know, all that has been revealed over 330 brisk pages of plot.

Like a non-linear film, the book begins with its ending and unspools the actions, performances and circumstances that lead to it. It’s a great first paragraph.

On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only eighteen years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen. The agony is sweet, as the mystics promised. It’s like your soul is being stabbed with light, the mystics said, and they were right about that, too. The mystics call that 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 fifties, glowing like a firefly. He runs to her and yells.

Apartment C4 is located in The Rabbit Hutch of the title, a low-income housing complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana (ranked first on Newsweek’s annual list of “Top Ten Dying American Cities”), a small rust belt city that disintegrated like Flint, Michigan after an automobile manufacturer shut down some years in the past. Blandine has changed her name from Tiffany, the name she was known by at the Saint Philomena prep school where she’d been a scholarship student. She is intelligent and excels at the school, but, by the time of the novel’s open, she has dropped out without finishing. She rooms in Apartment C4 with three teenage boys who, like her, are graduates of the Indiana foster care system.

The novel does not follow Blandine exclusively. The narration ducks inside other apartments in The Rabbit Hutch and gives short story like views of the lives inside. These are of varying length and dexterity. One neighbor who slowly becomes a focus of the book is the tenant in Apartment C2 (directly below Blandine’s C4), a forty-year-old woman named Joan Kowalski who lives alone and is employed by Restinpeace.com, screening the comments section of the site’s obituaries for foul language and mean-spirited remarks about the dead. The bioluminescent man in his fifties, a mystery when we encounter him in paragraph one, is the third of the novel’s major characters. His name is Moses Robert Blitz. He is the son of Elsie Blitz, a famous TV and film actress and a distant and indifferent mother. We learn he’s bioluminescent, because he is often compelled to strip to his underwear and cover his body in the liquid that’s inside glowsticks.

Along with some colorful characters, the novel’s energy comes from Gunty’s gift for phrases describing moments of spiritual distress. Loneliness grips a character “with the force of a puppeteer.” The teens that don’t want to talk about the foster families of the past get the same look on their faces: “Like they’re trapped in a flooding car.” In a heated moment, Moses Blitz “feels bad behavior coiling inside him like a wild cat.” Later, Moses “feels like he is attached to a bike pump of rage.” He describes his mother’s different laughs (she’s an actress, recall). “The various laughs of his mother funneled toward him: the tense one, the one that sounded like winter, the one that meant she was bored.” Blandine rages, too. “The rage shovels her out of herself, like it’s mining her for something to burn.” There are numerous ways that Blandine is described wanting to exit her body, and they are never boring.

Scattered throughout The Rabbit Hutch are moments of recognition between the several characters. Many of these moments involve Blandine who is almost too saintlike for realism, but only almost. Blandine looks at people. She notices them. We find out she left Saint Philomena after having a sexual encounter with her theater teacher. She was 17. He was 42 and married with two children. In one of the conversations in the aftermath, Blandine says, “I’m trying to recognize the full human dimension of each person I encounter, and I’m—honestly, I’m exhausted.” In their very first conversation in a laundromat, Blandine tells Joan Kowalski: “Sometimes I walk around, bumping into people, listening to them joke and fight and sneeze, and I don’t believe anyone is real. Not even myself. Do you know what I mean?” 75 pages or so later, we get: “[Blandine] wonders if there’s a word for the opposite of solipsism, wonders if such a term could accurately describe her psychological disorder.” The opposite of solipsism would suggest other minds, other subjectivities are real. The problem would shift, would become the problem of our own mind. Other minds exist. Ours might not.

But what if the opposite of solipsism is more like the radical attentiveness of Simone Weil. This is the mode a novel can take. It’s the thing a social novel can be.  As they converse in the laundromat, Blandine bombards Joan Kowalski with ideas and facts from the history of the mystics. She drops a quote from Simone Weil. “It’s like what Simone Weil says. ‘To know that this man who is hungry and thirsty really exists as much as I do—that is enough, the rest follows of itself.’ Simone was a bona fide mystic.” Blandine bites her nail. “What’s the rest, I wonder.”

This is clever. The phrase “the rest” can be read two ways. Weil writes, “the rest follows of itself.” That’s one way. Gunty knows, though, that many readers will seek out the rest of the work that is the source of the quote. The passage is from Weil’s “Attention and Will,” a section of Gravity and Grace published posthumously in 1947. Among aphoristic fragments about the soul and truth and God, there is the following: “Solitude. Where does its value lie? For in solitude, we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in greater possibility of attention. If we could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being…” To be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being would be to attend to the needs of that friend, neighbor, or stranger. This would, in a sense, be the opposite of solipsism, the realization that everyone we meet has an inner life as complex and sensitive as our own.

In her spiritual autobiography, Waiting for God, Weil writes, “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’”  A good novel will show us characters encountering each other’s internal lives. We notice them noticing each other.  Joan Kowalski expresses the feeling of being on the receiving end of this attentiveness. Early on, shy as she is, she’s puzzled and embarrassed about it.

First the girl at the laundromat, now Penny. Joan managed a sort of genetic predisposition toward invisibility for forty years, and then, within the span of a few days, two strangers solicited her autobiography without apparent reason. It’s moments like these when Joan fears she is a subject in some elaborate, federally funded psychology experiment.

Much later, Joan feels that meeting Blandine, talking to her, experiencing her attention and beginning to care for her, wakes something in herself.

She has suffered some psychological earthquake, and the vials that previously kept her associations from contaminating each other have shattered.

I’ll avoid spoiling the plot’s finale, but the final spiritual communion between these two women feels like an earned ending. Tess Gunty has done the work getting us to it. Blandine has been through trauma in the foster care system. She cares about the dying Vacca Vale, wants to help it, is willing to sabotage developers to establish her commitment to this home worth her care and attention. This is a daring book (nominated for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction), and it’s all the more impressive that a first-time novelist could pull it off.