Of the books I’ve read this year, The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty and The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride stand out as the most well written and interesting. There are distinct differences, but what they do have in common is their focus on specific communities and the diverse people that populate them.
In Tess Gunty’s debut novel The Rabbit Hutch, the main character, Blandine (her adopted name), lives with three young men, who like her have just aged-out of the foster care system. They share an apartment in an affordable-living building in fictional Vacca Vale, Indiana, where the residents whose paths they cross become central to the plot.
Blandine exemplifies brilliance that can only come from an author who is brilliant. Blandine is an astute observer of all that happens around her. She is well-read, knowledgeable, and enthralled with obscure subjects such as medieval mysticism. She is especially drawn to the seemingly invincible Christian martyr Blandina (Blandine), whose name she adopts as her own. One gets the feeling that Tess Gunty has incorporated everything she wished to write about thus far into this one work of literature.
In The Rabbit Hutch, Gunty takes liberties with form, something we can be grateful to her publisher for allowing her to do. For example, one chapter consists of drawings by one of the characters. Another contains an obituary and guest responses, which are quite hilarious. Some characters are introduced late in the novel, who are quirky and offer competing worldviews. While this form can be a bit challenging to a reader, the novel ultimately pulls it off quite well.
James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is set in the 1920s and 1930s in the neighborhood Chicken Hill, located in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. It focuses on the lives of the African Americans and Jewish immigrants in Chicken Hill, struggling to exist in a society that excludes them, and their intertwined and often uneasy relationships. McBride brilliantly portrays the characters in each community and their struggles with racism and discrimination by the white population and the immigrants who have secured success and moved outside the confines of Chicken Hill.
McBride, who is also a musician, draws on that expertise to make music central to the book in the creation of Moshe Ludlow who integrates the town’s first dance hall, which he and his wife Chona own along with the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Throughout the book we see a long list of great musicians of the time perform at the dance hall: the Mickey Katz, Chick Webb, and Lionel Hampton bands, and Machito and his Afro-Cubans orchestra, to name a few.
While The Rabbit Hutch and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store are set in different times and places, both deal with universal issues of power, class, economics, health, prejudice, and sexual violence. They also examine the impact of the environment on community, whether that is development’s destruction of green spaces or the lack of access to water and sanitation. In the end, each community faces unique challenges that cause its members to forge complex relationships intertwined with cruelty, anger, suffering, greed, jealousy, affection, and generosity.
Karen T Miller 