If you don’t sell them as pets, you got to get rid of them as meat … If you don’t have 10 separate cages for them, then they start fighting. Then the males castrate the other males … They chew their balls right off.”
The Rabbit Hutch
This was an excellent read. Tess Gurdy, at 30 won the National Book Award for this novel of vignettes depicting the lives of those living in a rundown apartment building --and yes it's called The Rabbit Hutch--in a run down Indiana town. The book is peppered with sentences that insist on being highlighted. And I did. In C4 is a brilliant 18 year old who according to the first line is exiting her body. Below her in C2 is a 40 year old who hears her screams, as does the 70 year old man above her as he shuffles down the stairs to leave a note and a dead mouse on another neighbor's door. There's a new mother in C10 who is afraid to tell her husband that she is afraid of her child's eyes; she won't look at them. The one outsider is a man named Moses who likes to spread glow stick gel over his body and scare his enemies in the middle of the night.
Gurdy grew up in Indiana and uses the backdrop of Vacca Vale as a model for South Bend, a town that also suffered from the closing of a once famous auto industry, the Studebaker. "the Rabbit Hutch itself, the apartment block where Blandine lives, a rust-belt relic of a place that, having outlived its usefulness to the motor industry, has been left to decay. Nothing but a scattering of incongruously grand buildings and a poisoned water table remain as testimony to the glory days of the Zorn automobile company. "(The Guardian)
The character sketches are brilliant and the evolving plot makes for a compulsive read. I always love the interconnectedness of multiple characters coming together, ( i.e.Egan's Goon Squad, Orange's There,There, and McCann's Let the Great World Spin). Gurdy manages to do that as well. Highly recommend and look forward to her future work.

Lines:

Kara had a taste for neon clothing, cinnamon gum, and anguished men.

New mother: "Her breasts are swollen to celebrity
size, there are bolts of electricity zapping the powerlines of her brain, and without any assistance from coffee, her body has awakened itself to the pitch of animal vigilance. The hormones have turned the volume of the world all the way up, angling her ears babyward, forcing her to listen—always listen—for his new and spitty voice. She feels like a fox. Like a fox on Adderall"

The woman’s hair is the color of mouse fur, her bangs are cut short, and
she is wearing woolly knitted clothes despite the heat. Forty-something. She has the posture of a question mark, a stock face and a pair of 19th-century eyeglasses. Her solitude is as prominent as the cross around her neck.”

With his smile, and those jeans, it’s evident to Blandine that
no one has ever truly criticized this young man to his face, and that he’s a product of extreme parental love.

Shortly after the exchange, another man arrives, bell chinking behind him. Bound in a dark leather jacket, the odor of cigarettes, and a fresh tan, his presence exerts its own gravity. He’d be well suited for a men’s deodorant commercial, Blandine thinks: handsome enough to serve as a vessel for positive self-projection, but not so handsome as to threaten the consumer’s personal sense of masculinity. Blandine senses that he has many tattoos, although she can’t see them. He wears his testosterone like a strong cologne

Her fellow students live in the suburbs
and spend their lunches complaining about the cruises that their mothers foist upon them. They exchange How My Parents Surprised Me with My First Brand-New Car stories and wear coats from luxury outdoor brands, as though driving to high school is an extreme sport

Speaking of scandals, did you hear that Kayla gave three lacrosse guys pterodactyl? Oh my God, you haven’t heard of this? It’s three guys, one girl. The guys stand side by side, in a row. She blows the guy in the middle, then gives the other two hand jobs. So it looks like she’s trying to fly.

It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in
common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved.

Throughout the visit, his sister arranged her clothes, voice, and posture to communicate superiority, so proud of herself for leaving their town, as though it were a maximum-security prison. As though it took more than a plane ticket, a cosmetology degree, and a dainty face for her to find another life. ( )

Some very we'll written parts but this story was confusing and hard to follow. ( )

Brilliantly DFW-esque in its bizarre diversions; never quite as good when it returns to the straight and narrow. Will definitely snap up her next one. ( )

I am sick and tired of books about young women having affairs with older and/or married men and coming to regret it. I think I’m officially too old for books like Luster and Rabbit Hutch. Rabbit Hutch is also marred by just plain weird and inexplicably motivated characters and some of the most implausible dialog I’ve ever heard. The scene where Blandine confronts her former lover in the car and critiques their relationship in terms of capitalism had me rolling my eyes. Descriptions of Blandine’s internal organs as her city of Vacca Vale left me scratching my head. I’m clearly not the millennial post-capitalist target audience for this book. ( )

(60) "Weird, but good." This was the advice from a colleague who gave me this as an unsolicited lend, and in fact -- I agree completely. A brilliant teenager ages out of the foster care system by dropping out of a prestigious Catholic high school in suburban Indiana after a devastating affair with a teacher. She latches onto bizarre causes as a lifeline, such as environmental advocacy against a development planned in her (crappy) city, and the lives of young Catholic female martyrs such as St. Hildegard. I noticed the author went to Notre Dame and this does not go unnoticed. A liberal mind with a Catholic upbringing resonates with this reader and this drew me in to the book.

This young girl, self christened, Blandine, (after some martyr or other) lives in a housing complex with thin walls and many other humans living lives of quiet desperation. Readers are privy to the lives of the other complex dwellers. Sometimes via quick blurbs featuring just their apartment number - for example "3C: So and so gazed down at their newborn baby with fear, etc., etc...." And sometimes we were in the inhabitants of these apartments minds and lives, even if they intertwined loosely or not at all with the protagonist, Blandine. The old couple who both hated and loved one other was particularly effective. The climactic scene is biblical, and oh-so-bizarre. At one point the scene was narrated via one of the weird minor characters strange comic art.

Really? Normally, I would hate this postmodernist schtick. At one point, BTW, there is even a shout out to 'WTF is postmodernist anyway? Nevertheless, I enjoyed this. It harkened back to the literary lesson I learned from one of my favorite books of all time, Stegner's 'Angle of Repose.' This idea that we are all just where we landed trying to do the best job we can and just barely keeping our heads above water, regardless of our personal circumstances. Amen.

Maybe I underrated this book. But there were detractions, such as plot points that were too random or seemed too contrived. For example, all the excerpts from Hildegard's books. It didn't seem like Blandine was the type of smart young girl who would actually buy that hyper-religiosity. And then - I got confused - who was this Elsie person with the sloth obituary? Versus "Pinky" the guy that was doing the re-development? Versus the weird guy (the son of Elsie) who rubbed himself with glow-sticks? The author spiraled off one too many times for me to keep track of there. But that might just be a 'me' problem.

But the BEST thing about this book was that someone actually drew attention to the phenomenon that I thought only I experienced!! That tingly sensation that one may experience when someone is giving you close personal attention. For me, it typically has to be attention from a little child (?). And it does involve whispering or when the attention-giver seems to be totally concentrating on the task at hand.

WEIRD, BUT GOOD. Indeed. ( )