The Rabbit Hutch

The novel’s setting of Vacca Vale, Indiana, was a manufacturing hub owing to the Zorn automobile factory, which employed many of the town’s inhabitants and affected the city’s layout. By the time the narrative begins, however, Zorn has been obsolete for decades, and the town is ranked first on Newsweek magazine’s list of “Top Ten Dying American Cities” (41). This is accompanied by an 11.7% unemployment rate and other dystopian attributes such as “the rat population surpassing the human population by an estimated 30,000” (40).

Although Vacca Vale is fictitious, it is loosely based on Gunty’s hometown of South Bend, Indiana, a postindustrial town that was dominated by the Studebaker car factory until it closed in the 1960s. Gunty, who was born in the 1990s, says that she still grew up feeling “haunted by this industry that I had no connection to”; she adds that the ghost of heavy industry still “determines so much about the structure of the city, even the urban design itself but also the culture of the city […] that guided a lot of their major decisions in life, including their voting patterns (Biles, Adam. “On Transcendence, Parental Failure & writing Indiana, with Tess Gunty.” Shakespeare and Company: Writers, Books, and Paris, 1 Sep 2022).

This is evident in how she describes Vacca Vale following the 1963 Zorn factory closure: “Zorn—a superhero in previous generations—became the Vacca Vale bogeyman. Zorn took away Christmas. Zorn was why parents drank themselves out of commission” (177). The residents experience a sense of abandonment and neglect as Zorn’s exit results in a cascade of economic hardships, from individual job and pension loss to tanking the local economy. Gunty describes this through a metaphor of yanking a tablecloth from underneath delicate, “elaborate china sets” (177), indicating the deep and complex repercussions of the loss of attention and resources. She also makes a connection between economic and domestic spheres and how macro-level decay disrupts families and interpersonal relationships.

Vacca Vale’s fate will be familiar to those who know the history of the Rust Belt, an area spanning from New York State to the Midwest. In the early 20th century, this area was known as the Manufacturing Belt for its prowess in the automotive and steel industry, which brought prosperity to the area. Although the region earned its derogatory nickname—Rust Belt—in the 1970s when much American manufacturing was sent abroad due to lower labor costs and technological advancements, some historians trace the beginning of the region’s decline to the 1950s. The region’s economic decline was accompanied by mass youth migration to other parts of the US and significant population shrinkage. For example, according to Investopedia, Detroit saw its population decrease from 1,849,568 in 1950 to 632,464 in 2021. As a result, “the Rust Belt is still mostly dominated by older, non-college-educated white voters, which traditionally lean toward the Republican Party” (Chen, James. “Rust Belt: Definition, Why It’s Called That, List of States.” Investopedia, 29 Nov 2022). Still, the zone is often one of contention between the two main US political parties and thus becomes a key battleground during elections.

Gunty emphasizes that she sought to move beyond overly simplistic caricatures of the Midwest as the breeding ground of far-right, Donald Trump-style voters and instead show how the complexity of the people who live there and experience the problems of post-industrial life. Gunty shows this in her novel through a diverse spread of characters, each of whom have been impacted differently by post-industrial decline and the resulting environmental problems from emissions and climate change. For example, during the city’s recent flood, the more impoverished people in La Lapinière, who lived by the river, had to be evacuated at their own expense, while the wealthy hillside residents like Yager and his wife were untouched by the waters. This is a metaphor for how postindustrial decline affects the poor vulnerable the most. Gunty argues that instead of viewing places like Vacca Vale as irrelevant backwaters, as politicians (outside of election time) have done for decades, we should note that “the problems that we consider to be quintessential American problems are so visible there” (Biles). Just as Blandine Watkins is determined to oppose the Vacca Vale development project by attempting to sabotage their spread of luxury condominiums in the Chastity Valley nature hub, we witness the enactment of culture wars that define day-to-day life in all parts of America.