The Rabbit Hutch

Blandine Watkins, aged out of foster care and sharing a subsidized apartment with three teenage boys who share her history, spends her days absorbed in the writings of medieval mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, women who described their own visions as a kind of bodily escape, transcendence achieved by starving or otherwise punishing the flesh. Gunty sets that historical material against Vacca Vale, Indiana, a Rust Belt town gutted by an auto plant's closure and now targeted by a development scheme that treats its remaining residents as an obstacle to redevelop around, and lets Blandine's fixation on mystical self-erasure read as the logical extreme of a place that has already, in every practical sense, stopped valuing the people living in it.

The novel widens outward from La Lapiniere, the crumbling apartment complex that gives the book its title, through a rotating cast of neighbors, a new mother struggling with dissociation, an actor haunted by a role, and Joan, a moderator scrubbing violent content and grief-stricken comments from a memorial website, whose stories keep circling the same argument: that ordinary American precarity, foreclosed jobs, absent parents, algorithmic surveillance, produces its own species of disembodiment long before anyone reaches for Hildegard's visions to explain it.

Gunty gives the apartment building its own interstitial narration, gossiping about its tenants in a collective, almost choral voice that treats the structure itself as a kind of witness. The device keeps the novel from settling into any single character's tragedy; the building has seen this pattern of neglect and disappointment before, and will see it again after the events of this particular week are over.

Running underneath the personal plots is a municipal subplot, a proposed redevelopment that would demolish the town's remaining wetland habitat for a park nobody who lives there actually asked for, and Gunty treats that civic indifference as continuous with everything happening to Blandine: a system willing to bulldoze a marsh for a photo opportunity is the same system that lets a barely supervised teenager fall through every safety net designed, on paper, to catch her.