Life and death. That’s the sequence, for all of us. We live. Then we die. But before we die, we witness and participate in the deaths of many, many others. That reality consumes some people. The deaths of those close to us can be a sadness, a responsibility, an inconvenience, or all of the above and then some. These grim endings, spaced out over time, have an accumulative affect. Death reminds us that we’re in line for the same.
Janice Deal’s novel, “The Sound of Rabbits,” revolves around a mother’s long-term health crisis. Barbara suffers from Parkinson’s, her decline palpable to younger daughter Val, who chose to remain in her hometown of Ladyford, Wisconsin, but more abstract to older daughter Ruby, who chased a musical dream to Chicago. Barbara’s memory loss amounts to a death before her death. Her illness all but blocks her access to a history of relationships, triumphs, sorrows, and life events. Val experiences this up close; Ruby more remotely, or at least only sporadically.
With a new emergency health crisis unfolding, Ruby caves to her sister’s pleas to return home, despite the fact that she’s scheduled to play a concert solo that represents a return to an active musical life. Sacrifice. On the surface, that seems to be what much of this caregiving life is about, and we feel that on Ruby’s conflicted drive from her adopted to her birth home.
But it’s more than merely sacrifice. Deal, through multiple points of view that include mothers and daughters, dear friends, grandchildren, ex-lovers, a revered dead uncle, store clerks, random receptionists, even a cat, weaves a complicated story in which the past must be reconciled with the present.
The cliché is that death is a part of life, but that’s not quite right. Death is the end of life. In “The Sound of Rabbits,” Deal chases the meaning of death for those of us left breathing. Is death the ultimate eraser?
The surface plot primarily addresses the relationship between Ruby and Val. The contrast between the two sisters is as stark as that between Val’s small, simple northern Wisconsin hometown and Val’s big, sophisticated Chicago home. Their mother’s illness amplifies long-standing grudges and misunderstandings.
The alternating points of view allow us to access, chapter by chapter, characters whose lives intersect, if not intertwine. Deal layers these chapters in a way that shows us the delicate balance between and amongst the many lives that populate the landscape. We see how no relationship or action is isolated. Everything is part of a web. Val “thinks of her mother. At the hospital, Barbara’s eyes had been half-closed, her face loose in a slipping away that Val tells herself is almost like sleep. In this regard, Val is like her mother; she is waiting for something to happen. She is waiting for something to be over.”
Deal’s prose style is pretty and compact. She moves easily between voices old and young, male and female. The individual character studies shine with specificity and insight. With the introduction of each character, we see more of the picture. Moon taught, loved, and shaped the family he adopted and who adopted him. When he became ill and died, it changed life for his survivors and left Val and Ruby as the only remaining caregivers of his sister. Judgmental, protective Pearl exhibits a fierce loyalty that grows stronger as her friend Barbara grows weaker. Sooner, with only months left before a terminal illness will surely end his life, serves as a reminder of a past also littered with illness and death, but kindness, as well. Up close, Ruby experiences a compassionate, peaceful, and funny man not anything like the caricature he’s become through small-town gossip.
This fluidity between past and present takes on an intensity in the atmosphere of impending death. “Val is still comforted by these books, which she and Barbara drowsed over until it was properly time to go to bed, even as she doesn’t believe them. They lay out clearly what is Good, or Bad, a perspective so much more manageable than, say, the ideas Val gets in the middle of the night.”
It takes nearly the whole novel for Ruby to screw up the courage to actually visit her mother. Instead, she catches up with an old boyfriend and his wife. She reunites with an old friend. She goes back to her childhood home. All of this is Ruby’s way to take inventory of her life, what it means to have had relationships that went dormant or sour, experiences that faded, a mother who will no longer be. It forces Ruby to confront who she was, who she thought she would be, who she is, and who she might still become.
Val has her own way of coping, shouldering responsibility for her mother and two children, as well as her husband. Dakota, a portrait of teen angst and anger, challenges Val in one way, while Junie, still naïve and impressionable, challenges her in another. Val escapes into poetry and desperately tries to find friends in a small-town environment often content with the status quo. She, like her sister, wonders if reinvention, or improvement, can still happen, or if her reality has become too entrenched to move.
“The Sound of Rabbits” is superbly crafted. Deal paces the story in a way both rapid and thoughtful, and works scenes that allow a seamless blend of surface action and undercurrent. She grounds the novel mostly in a smartly nuanced small-town setting, but also does expert work in making Chicago integral to the plot. The call to action that sets the story in motion amounts to an open-ended trip back home. In this extended, intense trip, Deal allows her characters to confront the entirety of their existence and the relationship it has with the myriad people mixed up in it. The result of all this introspection is predictably sad, but not exclusively so. It is in the cracks between struggles that these characters find hope, satisfaction, and even joy. In this light, we see how resilience, pride and love persevere, even as the people around us expire.
“The Sound of Rabbits” By Janice Deal Regal Publishing House, 252 pages, $18.95
Donald G. Evans is the author of a novel and story collection, as well as the editor of two anthologies of Chicago literature, most recently “Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry.” He is the Founding Executive Director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
Just Another Obstacle: A Review of "The Fell" British author Sarah Moss has written another quiet yet deeply moving short novel that takes place during the pandemic over the course of about twenty-four hours.
Life and death. That’s the sequence, for all of us. We live. Then we die. But before we die, we witness and participate in the deaths of many, many others. That reality consumes some people. The deaths of those close to us can be a sadness, a responsibility, an inconvenience, or all of the above and then some. These grim endings, spaced out over time, have an accumulative affect. Death reminds us that we’re in line for the same.
