How did the novel begin? I was just out of the way, it was summer and I was living in Brooklyn and spending my time in Prospect Park. I would just take a notebook and some books and no electronics at all, and almost all the characters came to me then. It was so hot, sometimes I think it was thermal hallucinations. They arrived with nothing but their most extreme qualities, and so the five-year project before me was to make these eccentric behaviors not only believable but inevitable in these people. What made you want to write about the midwest? I’ve been writing fiction pretty obsessively since I was a kid, and when I was young I thought the absence of the rust belt in fiction was a good reason to never create my own work there. I always put it in some imaginary country or a city I had once been to. Then, in my early 20s, I began to realize that the absence of the rust belt in fiction was a very good reason to put something there. What does the rest of the world get wrong about the Midwest? One of the things that frustrates me is that politicians seem to treat the midwest, especially the rust belt, as if it’s only home to one kind of hurt and rage voter. is easily exploited, and this voter is usually characterized as a working-class white male who voted for Trump. In fact, the rust belt is extremely different. it is much more diverse than the US on average, and there are many different ideologies there. It is a place that is vast and mysterious. There is a seam of Catholicism that runs through the novel. Were you raised Catholic? Yes, I was an almost insanely devoted child. My mother’s kind of Catholicism is very supernatural, signs and wonders kind, and her approach to religion was for me inseparable from my belief in magic and fairies and Santa Claus, so she made the world feel very more exciting. There was always that bridge you could cross to another realm. Politicians seem to treat the Midwest as home to only one kind of pain-and-anger voter What happens now? When I was 15 years old, I started rejecting it outright, and my entry point to this rejection was the growing awareness of its patriarchal structure and then all the abuse scandals. I wanted to get as far away from the Catholic church as I could, so I was very surprised to see the presence of Catholicism in my work, especially since it wasn’t as bitter and resentful as I expected. You can capture entire characters through short lists of traits. How would you sum up yourself? I guess I’d start with the idiosyncrasies and aberrations. I have to pace when I talk on the phone. I think chocolate is overrated. and I thought I would be a mystic when I was a child. There are a lot of rabbits in this novel. Did you have a pet rabbit as a child? I used to have. Her name was Elizabeth and she was black and white and I loved her very much. Rabbits evoke many conflicting associations: Playboy and Donnie Darko, magic shows and the Easter Bunny. They are edible, but they are also pets – we don’t have many such animals. I was drawn to this novel because it gave me a chance to think about predators and prey, and also to think about them as gateways to other worlds, like the White Rabbit is in Alice in Wonderland. You quote from Roger & Me by Michael Moore as an epigram. I just liked the documentary overall, but he finds this woman selling rabbits – dozens and dozens in a cage – and she has this quote about how you have to castrate males or they’ll attack each other. That image never left my mind. It seemed to perfectly encapsulate the kind of entrapment I was trying to capture in the book, the way structural violence creates interpersonal violence. What these rabbits wanted to be freed from was the cage, but they were attacking each other. The climate crisis triggers background anxiety in the novel. Could you consider writing a novel in which it was not? I think it’s such an omnipresent and terrifying force that even if I were writing historical fiction, it would probably find a way to creep in. Humans have always been quite destructive to their landscapes – at least the colonial powers certainly have. What books are on your nightstand? I just started reading Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert. Its pace is environmental disaster, so it’s really terrible bedtime reading. And then I have a collection of poems by an indigenous New Zealand writer, Tayi Tibble, called Poūkahangatus. I have read a few and they are dazzling. For fiction, I just started reading Taiga Syndrome, which is by Cristina Rivera Garza. It’s something of a crime novel, but so far more of a meditation on discovery itself. It is very good. Which novelists working today do you most admire? Most of my favorite modern authors are not strictly novelists, but two novelists I really admire are Zadie Smith, just because she gives herself a whole new challenge with each book she writes and constantly refines her thinking, and Yuri Herrera, who is a Mexican author, and everything I’ve read by him is just perfect. What was the last great book you read? A poetry collection called Factory Girls by Takako Arai. She is Japanese and grew up in a silk factory. It is about the brutality of industrialism and it is breathtaking. Do you read a lot of poetry? It’s the thing that appeals to me the most. Contemporary poetry right now is so exciting, and it’s the work that always makes me want to write. What are you planning to read next? Something deeply hidden, a book by a theoretical physicist named Sean Carroll. It addresses questions that are fundamental to quantum physics, and every time I learn something about this world I say, “Why isn’t this breaking news? We all need to talk about this!” The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty is published by Oneworld (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Shipping charges may apply
