The Rabbit Hutch

Gunty began her project with the broad question of “how does structural violence generate interpersonal violence?” (Biles, 3:33). The La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex, which was initially constructed by a Christian philanthropist to house Zorn Factory workers, was ideal for her mission because she was able to show how people living in relative squalor mirror in their behavior the contempt and neglect that is shown to them by the authorities. Gunty focuses her inquiry on the three days before Blandine exits her body, thereby making it seem “possible to trace a series of collisions over the course of three days in a very contained setting” (Biles 4:16). In the manner of predecessors who wrote novels set in apartment blocks such as J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975) and Georges Perec’s Life, A User’s Manual (1978), Gunty challenges the solipsistic constraints of the traditional novel, which often centers on the dreams and struggles of a singular protagonist whom other characters orbit. Instead, the apartment block novel is a populous one that spotlights several psyches and the ways the characters are affected by the actions and attitudes of others.

The thin walls of the Rabbit Hutch, where “you can hear everyone’s lives progress like radio plays,” are a metaphor for the interpermeability of lives in impoverished, cramped conditions (354). Similarly, the building’s rodent problem, symbolic of its decay, expresses the overwhelming nature of the characters’ troubles and their lack of ability to escape. When desperate new mother Hope flings a dead mouse out of the window and wonders where it lands, it symbolizes some curiosity about the neighbors and how her actions affect them. However, at the same time, she is driven to foist her troubles on someone else. When we meet senior couple Ida and Reggie, who are the recipients of Hope’s dead mice, we learn that every action has a consequence and that the closeness of the surroundings augments the impacts of harm. For example, Ida begins to form a malicious picture of Hope and her husband, thinking “they have no concept of respect” and no sense of community (24). However, this loathing begins something akin to a fascination, and she fixates on everything that seems wrong with them until she determines that Reggie needs to drop the mouse in its trap on their doormat. Reggie warns “this is how wars start,” a statement that seems hyperbolic at the beginning of the novel, but not at the end given the violence enacted on Blandine by her roommates (24).

While Blandine’s male housemates are trapped by toxic masculinity, the neighbors who loathe the four teenagers in C4 for the ungodly noises coming from their apartment are instrumental in breaking up the assault and calling the police. Ironically, interloper Moses, who came to La Lapinière to wreak revenge on Joan, gets the wrong apartment and sacrifices the belt of his trench coat to bind Blandine’s wound instead of enacting his planned violence, thereby saving her life. Moreover, his phosphorescent skin allows him to pass in the guise of a radiant savior in Blandine’s mystic-framed experience of leaving her body. This surreal touch exemplifies the elements of chance and luck in the collisions afforded in a populous housing block, thus merging the expectations of Medieval Europe with those of 21st-century America.

Blandine plays an instrumental role in questioning the pretend anonymity of La Lapinière’s residents. It is far more natural to her that people living close by should know each other instead of being strangers. When she talks to Joan in the launderette, Joan’s nondescript appearance—“she has the posture of a question mark, a stock face” (29)—is a symbol of the anonymous relationships between residents—they are interchangeable with one another. Blandine’s attempt to engage Joan with her vital concerns about the afterlife represents a desire for connection and belonging. However, owing to Blandine’s strange appearance and the disruptive noises coming from her apartment, Joan remains prejudiced against her until the end, thinking that a girl who lived with three boys must be hungry for attention. At the end of the novel, however, Joan’s frequent visions of Blandine’s “slashed belly” illustrate the visceral connection that has been made between the two women, and Joan’s inability to sleep or go to work knocks down the metaphorical wall between them. When Joan comments that Blandine is “awake” at the hospital and Blandine asks if Joan is too, this marks a search for common ground that will heal the divisions of earlier times. The accompanying “peculiar flash of light” that “shivers across the room” is a physical embodiment of the enlightenment that touches the two women (410).