The Struggles of the Hypermodern Novel
It is not often that a reader can track the development of an author from unpublished exercises and juvenilia to the cleanly edited pages of a debut novel. In the case of Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch, published by Knopf in August 2022, this reader has been allowed such a privileged perspective, if only incidentally. Though I cannot claim the acumen of reviewers from the likes of The New York Times and The Guardian, I can offer some insider knowledge on Gunty's progression and what it means for contemporary American fiction.
In brief, Gunty's novel combines elements found in other contemporary novels—including those of her mentors from her MFA program at NYU and her undergraduate studies at Notre Dame—to achieve a synthesis of new media, non-linear storytelling, and poetic prose that might be dubbed “hypermodern.” It is not merely the inclusion of online comment sections, emojis, and surrealist illustrations in the novel's pages that warrants this label. More importantly, the novel seems to narrow in on an investigation of human life at this very moment, telling the story of the residents of a run-down housing complex in middle America, a story told, fittingly, in the present tense. One can question, however, whether our present moment can be captured and contained adequately by fixating, for example, on our collective obsession with the internet and social media. Gunty, to her credit, does go further than that (though references to digital culture—and rabbits—abound).
The Rabbit Hutch announces itself from its opening epigraphs as a fusion of twentieth-century social documentary and, in what must come as a surprise to most readers, medieval mysticism: Gunty cites filmmaker Roger Moore and Hildegard von Bingen, the latter of whom is referenced repeatedly by the precocious female protagonist Blandine. This evocation of centuries' old Catholic spirituality ought to provide the novel with historic depth, but the thoughts of the great mystic don't undergo much contextualization. Rather, the teenager subjects them to her own categories, reconceptualizing divine ecstasy as an “elevated form of masturbation” and questioning whether “a contemporary mystic” might need to “break out of her solitude.” Viewed in modern terms, Hildegard's contemplation must lead to action: “In order for her life to be considered ethical, thinks Blandine, she must try to dismantle systemic injustice.” Indeed, Blandine proves to be something of an ecological activist herself, as one of the novel's central plot elements involves repurposing a nature preserve as a tech hub to gentrify the post-industrial town. The concern about environmental doom is voiced not only by the protagonist but also by a young, childless couple, a seventy-year-old priest, and a former child actress from the glory days of American cinema who bequeaths her fortune to a foundation for the preservation of endangered sloths. It's the world as we have come to know it. Did I mention that one of the teenaged leads is trying to become Instagram famous? It all reads contemporary, twenty-first-century American; in a word: hypermodern.
On its surface, then, Gunty's novel takes on the form and content of its time with chameleon-like exactness. It is an impressive feat. But just as the chameleon's transformation occurs superficially, this novel's hypermodern dressings are a cover for something deeper. Even the brilliance of Gunty's prose is not itself the novel's beating heart. (She seems to have taken the advice of her mentor Jonathan Safran Foer, who speaks of the need for fiction to learn from poetry in this Louisiana Channel interview.) Gunty chooses her words—her adjectives especially—with precision. Midwesterners flash “supermarket smiles” while mansions are perched on “sloping minty lawns.” But perhaps greater attention is paid to the arrangement of morally fraught scenes, which frequently play in the wings of the main plot: one customer at a cafe refusing to yield an unoccupied chair; a grieving woman dodging her partner's consoling embrace on a street corner; a boy casting his sister as an enemy on the playground; an apartment dweller invoking the golden rule as grounds for delivering a dead mouse to a neighbor's doorstep. In contrast to the main conceits of the novel—the omnipresence of apps and devices, the pent-up sexual appetites, the vacillating perspectives—it is this human focus that gives The Rabbit Hutch its depth.
It is often the case that the hypermodern novel can only tell us about the present because it refuses to engage with the expanse of human history. But when Gunty portrays the basic human tendency to self-isolate and deny the other, she is gesturing at an idea that is less entangled in the trappings of our place and time. This dynamic, along with the evocative prose, is something which I have observed in her writing from the beginning. The tragedy and sadness of The Rabbit Hutch does not stem primarily from a “modern condition.” The burden of consciousness and the desire to be free of the body, which are felt so prominently by the novel's protagonist, echo ancient preoccupations with overcoming the self. Stoicism and Gnosticism channeled these drives well before the writings of Hildegard von Bingen. But the novel's second epigraph—“Invisible and eternal things are made known through visible and temporal things”—invites the reader to look beyond her day and age without, however, dispensing with the importance of historic particulars.
This lesson might require some re-learning among certain circles of contemporary American writers, dutifully producing their own takes on the “human condition” in MFA workshops. Though I am no connoisseur of hypermodern fiction myself, it takes little more than a perusal of new releases at an airport bookstore to realize most everything mass-marketed today concerns itself with the present age. Often, the story circles around the life of one modern individual, heroically oppressed, unique and set apart in some atypical fashion. If The Rabbit Hutch were only about Blandine in her battle to escape the Indianan foster care system, it would be one exemplar among many. Gunty, however, is reaching, along with Hildegard von Bingen, for a more timeless quality. She is depicting the present, but she is also using the present as a prism to refract the unseen reality of human self-entrapment that is not caused merely by modern technology. In the final scenes of the novel, a somewhat marginal character confronts Blandine in a hospital room after previously avoiding real conversation with her in their neighborhood laundromat. She is left struggling internally to make a connection: “She wants to say: I'm glad they didn't kill you. She wants to say: I am sorry for every instance I took when I could have given. 'You're awake,' Joan says instead, incongruously.” The failure to communicate empathetically may be occasioned and intensified by modern circumstances, as the characters huddle “between cheap walls that isolate not a single life from another.” But the source of this dilemma lies somewhere much further back in the human genealogy.
The Good Samaritan by Vincent van Gogh
Something that other reviewers have failed (or refused) to notice is key here: Gunty's novel carries vestigial structures of the Catholic worldview endemic to her hometown of South Bend, Indiana, on which the novel's Vacca Vale is based. As if the allusions to Hildegard weren't enough, nearly every reference to religion in the novel is a reference to Christianity (to Catholicism in particular). Muffled beneath the sounds of contemporary American life, the discerning reader will hear the reverberations of a question posed to Jesus after his proclamation of the commandment to love thy neighbor: “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). In many inescapable ways, The Rabbit Hutch is another attempt to wrestle with the difficulty of answering that question and living out the high standard that proceeds it, a standard that elevates human life above the frenzy of animals bound in a cage.
Charles Ducey hails from the Midwest, attended the University of Notre Dame, and has a penchant for transatlantic travel.