The Rabbit Hutch v. My Volcano
The 2023 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 17 • OPENING ROUND
The Rabbit Hutch
v. My Volcano
Judged by ML Kejera
ML Kejera (he/him) is an Illinois-based Gambian writer. His work has previously been published, or is forthcoming, in Strange Horizons, adda, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Nation. He was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / @KejeraL
I’ll admit to an annoying habit when reading books that attempt to capture, in any way, the constant newness of the present moment: nitpicking. You scan for the inclusion of anything recognizably outdated, false but was once thought true, simply forgotten and no longer funny, or embarrassing in hindsight (think memes). So reading two books that capture today so well was exciting.
Both My Volcano and The Rabbit Hutch take a fragmentary approach with sections shifting not only from character to character but jumping from genre to genre as well. Folktales particularly make up a large part of My Volcano and epistolary formulations are not infrequent in The Rabbit Hutch. Both novels can be described as kaleidoscopic, intimately about seeing the whole through parts. Both feature at least one character experiencing the world of at least one other character. What’s fascinating and commendable about both is that they tie this fragmentation to the internet, managing to depict it in a way that might be called cringe in a few years but is representative of the now. Both have as their audience, I imagine, people familiar with, as listed in My Volcano, "Tumblr posts, Reddit, archived web pages, fan-fiction sites, archaic forums." Amusingly, both make slight use of emoji. 😊
I’m a bit hesitant when it comes to literature about other countries from Americans.
In My Volcano, a volcano arises in New York City. A sort-of apocalypse ensues, consisting of all the atrocities to which we are ever in danger of becoming numb. Eulogies to real people subjected to systemic violence break up the flow of the book. The easiest way to read the volcano is an absurdist stand-in for all this systemic violence. Yet there’s a more considered and layered approach to the absurd here, reminiscent of another writer who modernized folktales, the incomparable Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (who lends his name to a character, I believe). We get the perspective of the global effects of this volcano rising from the viewpoints of characters around the world, from scientists to receptionists to artists.
As the volcano hit its apex, and then stopped growing, surrounded by rubble on the other side of the country, Makayla kept slipping her headphones on, turning the music up, and climbing on and off the BART to work at Easy-Rupt three days a week. But things were different. Now, she almost always put the heavy lemon in her bag, causing her to have to switch shoulders several times on the commute, and every night she fell asleep and woke up in someone else's body.
For reasons that should be especially obvious to Americans, I’m a bit hesitant when it comes to literature about other countries from Americans (even from Canadian Americans like Stintzi). That said, when there’s evidence of research and recognition of larger biases (generally just not being a dipshit), it’s always intriguing. American media is, of course, largely unavoidable. Writing that takes this into effect is always appealing to me. As it seems to draw so much especially from Japanese culture, it’s heartening to see a serious and respectful approach. Akutagawa himself was a writer who also often looked back at the Japanese literary tradition through the lens of Western literature.
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My Volcano is a radical novel in the sense that it imagines total, systemic renewal as a solution to current systems of oppression. It imagines all these violent vectors as, ultimately, attacks on human connectivity. On a micro level, it explores this disruption and detachment too. Characters are often watching others through screens, yearning to communicate what they’re holding within to people whom they find it easier to experience through distance.
The Rabbit Hutch is about a small town but, other than one character’s fascination with a European nun, it is focused too on exteriority, on being outside the skin, the self. The book is also centered around systemic violence: gentrification that affects a small town, the American foster care system, localized environmental catastrophe, and the predation of young women. Perspectives within the book largely consist of the residents of a rundown apartment building in the dying town of Zorn, which used to be a beacon of the United States’ automobile industry. They're tied together by an act of violence that occurs within an apartment. The book’s varying sections make use of a fascinating leitmotif where a character expresses some wish for exteriority or escape, echoing our protagonist Blandine’s deepest wish.
Particularly over the course of the pandemic, I’ve been fascinated by literary depictions of the internet.
Both novels end up being intimately about America, too. The Rabbit Hutch more obviously but even My Volcano, which features time traveling to a Mexica empire, only does so in relation to the formation of the Americas. Yes, both novels tackle similar subject matter with similar lenses but, particularly over the course of the pandemic, I’ve been fascinated by literary depictions of the internet. Zoom is seemingly here to stay. Recent films (Glass Onion, White Noise) have addressed the pandemic directly, touching on how it feels we are more reliant than ever on the internet. In literature, I’m most interested in the direct ways that manifests on the page, what visually lingers from using the internet. In The Rabbit Hutch, Gunty underlines links that have presumably already been clicked in whatever fictional article we happen to be reading. This is not to say that Stintzi’s fantastic novel doesn’t have pertinent things to say about our usage of the internet. But I’ve been thinking of this sentence from The Rabbit Hutch since I read it: “Taken in sum, the graffiti on the Zorn factories looks just like the internet.” Tying fragmentation and the internet to the modern condition is brilliant on the part of both books but My Rabbit Hutch simply comes together more for me as a book. I, frankly, don’t feel qualified to say whether that determines one book is better than another, if anyone is, but it does speak more to me as I am now. Fragmentary work has one naturally thinking of sequentiality. Both books have sections that go over the sequence of events we’ve just been reading about in a straightforward, list manner. The Rabbit Hutch, however, goes further by having a character with an interest in comics, the medium of sequentiality. It even includes sequential images, the definition of comics offered by Will Eisner, some reminiscent of the wordless novels (precursors to the American comic book) of Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward. The images in question are full-page splashes that recreate the the events of the book from the perspective of this one character. Both novels are fascinated by the multimedia experience that is the internet but The Rabbit Hutch is, itself, multimedia.
So, yeah, it boils down to one book having pictures and the other one not. Happy reading! 😊
Advancing:
The Rabbit Hutch
Match Commentary
with Meave Gallagher and Alana Mohamed
Meave Gallagher: Judge Kejera is very funny, which I really needed, after another pair of books addressing systemic violence. What is it about these times that has so many writers examining the ways we harm one another?
Alana Mohamed: I am glad to see some joyful engagement this time around. I think increasingly people find it cathartic to read about the complicated (terrible?) ways we treat each other under duress. With all the information *waves hands* out there, I find myself cognizant to the point of anxiety about the harm I perpetuate just by existing.
Meave: I sympathize, I really do.
Alana: Something about the layers of text, image, video I scroll through daily makes it seem sometimes like there’s no escape and no point in trying to do good. I don’t know you to be a huge Twitter human, but do you ever feel like that, scrolling through your various feeds?
Meave: I waste a lot of time worrying about embodying that Niemöller quote. (“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…”) I couldn’t finish My Volcano. For me, it was less “absurd,” in Judge Kejera’s words, than horrifying. I can take some solace in humor; I love Climate Town on YouTube. But mostly I’m scared and depressed.
Alana: My Volcano is the type of story I would send to my parents to convince them we are in a crisis, and the type of story they would brush off as fiction. I think, because we are people who are tuned into the bad stuff out there, the bad stuff in My Volcano feels very real.
Meave: It didn’t treat me well!
Alana: Judge Kejera gestures toward the way the two novels span genres. I suspect that, too, may parcel out the doom in a way that’s digestible to readers. But I can see how the same “considered and layered approach” might add context or help one through the tough spots, or even delight on a craft level.
Meave: To address Judge Kejera’s point, the research assistant’s name is Akutagawa Hitomi. I hadn’t read any Ryūnosuke Akutagawa before, but let me just pull this quote from his “Note to a Certain Old Friend”: “Suicide, as with all our actions, involves a complexity of motives...I am driven by, at the very least, a vague sense of unease…towards my future.” If the judge meant to make this connection, well done; it seems as applicable to the “disruption and detachment” My Volcano’s characters experience as to The Rabbit Hutch’s residents’ “wish for exteriority or escape.” I don’t know how our judge stayed so cheery.
Alana: There is a kind of joy in seeing your own anxieties reflected back at you in such an artful manner. I feel like I’m expected to push through so much and ignore the fact that people are suffering and fascists are organizing and Earth is dying. There’s a real desire to push through, ignore, deny that can make one feel very lonely—and, of course, it’s understandable. Most people are trying to pay rent, pay off debt, and survive. Who has the time?
Meave: I always make time to work my rosary of anxieties.
Alana: It’s a relief to read something that speaks pointedly about the way we now live our lives and connects the many tragedies that have unfolded in our lifetime. Based on Judge Kejera’s comments, there is quite a bit of play in both novels that propel the reader through the grimness of the content.
Meave: I got stuck in the grimness, but I think you’re right about the possibility of finding such relief, especially when you don’t have sufficient (or any) outlets for your despair. Which makes me think about “tying fragmentation and the internet to the modern condition is brilliant on the part of both books.”
Alana: I know our judge is speaking specifically to the form of the two books, which he points out both switch between genres and narrators. I’m reminded of Davey Davis’s the earthquake room, which employs a similar, if more subdued tactic to paint a picture of a queer couple awaiting the Big One in an increasingly apocalyptic world. Push notifications and video feeds wove out of scenes and I thought, “Oh, yes, this is what it’s like to be on the internet.” It protrudes into your daily life, especially if you feel vulnerable in any way. The bubbles we find ourselves in can create just as much suspicion and fear.
Meave: The communal mind: Some days it helps, some days it hurts.
Alana: I thought it was interesting that Judge Kejera spoke of “evidence of research and recognition of larger biases” as something he looks for in books by American writers about non-Americans. It seems like, as we become more and more connected across nations, the ability to synthesize different perspectives becomes integral to the project of solidarity. But how much are different perspectives being flattened or sanitized in the discourse?
Meave: Gonna let Horkheimer and Adorno take this one: “Progress keeps people literally apart…. Communication makes people conform by isolating them.” Things haven’t changed that much in the last 80 years, I guess.
Alana: It seems like this judgment hinged on how well each novel mimicked the experience of the internet. I was struck by Judge Kejera’s observation that these novels might become cringe in time. I wonder if the project of capturing the experience of scrolling through the internet itself will become cringe.
Meave: I think that’d be due more to scrolling becoming obsolete than global interconnectivity. That Rabbit Hutch line our judge loved about the building graffiti looking “just like the internet”—is the internet a massive palimpsest? Scratch a Substack, find a Diaryland? After 30-some years of using the internet, I don’t know that I like all the “constant newness” Judge Kejera praises in both books. Some of it is terrible! And I mourn my privacy, and the sense of freedom and safety.
Alana: This is, of course, one of the reasons libraries are so important. They’re a place to freely explore information without being monitored. If we think of the pressure on libraries during the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, we see how valuable that can be. But as the world grows more reliant on the internet—and social media companies specifically—the more these kinds of attributes are at risk. Especially during the pandemic, when everything was closed physically, libraries were newly reliant on social media platforms to reach their communities.
Meave: I’m torn on libraries participating in social media. It feels antithetical to the concept of freedom of privacy—but how else are public libraries going to sell themselves? Show me someone under 35 who opens a library newsletter. I’m not gonna yell about the American Library Association right now, but maintaining an inherently contradictory position is untenable.
Alana: Libraries are in a tough spot trying to serve the public when the public is increasingly reliant on shady companies for work, school, and socializing.
Meave: The internet is regulated like a public utility, but living in California in 2000 and 2001 made the concept of “public utility” a pretty sick joke. More rural areas still lack reliable broadband access, but I know librarians in Queens who lost track of regular patrons when the libraries closed in 2020 because those people had no way to access the internet at home; some didn’t even have basic telephone service. A big project for public libraries right now is reconnecting with their communities.
To that end, there is a since-closed Zorn brewery complex in Indiana; it doesn’t seem to bear the graffiti that Judge Kejera so loved, but it does have gentrification! The complex looks like it would make cool communal living, though, and community is something we’re told so many of the characters in both novels are desperate for. Do you know your neighbors?
Alana: I know and like my neighbors! Many of them are West Indian immigrants so they remind me of my parents.
Meave: That sounds like the start of a community to me! I know my neighbors’ dogs better than my neighbors. But everyone’s got to have dreams, and I want my labor to be in service to my community—a big reason I wanted to become a librarian in the first place.
Coming up, in the final match of the opening round, judge Abayomi Animashaun presides over Nuyorican family saga Olga Dies Dreaming versus a Black Oaklander’s struggle to survive in Nightcrawling. We’ll see you back here soon!
Today’s mascot
Today’s match mascot is Lola, the faithful companion of the Commentariat’s favorite baronnessvonbookhausen. Lola is two and a half, a shepherd/lab/husky mix (and maybe a little fox?). While her trainer has characterized Lola as “dramatic,” she likes to think of herself as merely complex. Lola loves the snow. Accordingly, as a reader, she would tend toward long, Russian novels, or maybe Hanya Yanagihara’s oeuvre. Given that, her top five for this ToB were somewhat surprising. We love Lola!
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