Teaching The Great Gatsby for the first time during the chaotic early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I failed to notice that, despite extensively referencing the First World War, the novel omits any mention of the accompanying 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. When I taught the book again the following spring, after the COVID death toll in the U.S. surpassed 500,000, this struck me as startling and bizarre. How could Fitzgerald so neatly elide any memory of such a cataclysmic and far-reaching event? Wouldn’t his contemporary readers object? Now, in 2024, I understand the allure of literary worlds in which COVID is barely acknowledged, if at all. Who wants to return to 2021? As such, I initially recoiled when I learned that Melanie Cheng’s new novel The Burrow (Tin House, 2024) is set during lockdown. But this slender, multi-protagonist family novel surprised me: this is the pandemic book I didn’t know I needed.
The Burrow begins when Jin and Amy Lee, an upper-middle class couple in suburban Melbourne, Australia, adopt a rabbit to cheer up their ten-year-old daughter, Lucie, during lockdown. Immediately, dread sets in—what will happen to this rabbit? Yet figuring out how to confront this dread is central to the project of the novel—and by extension, the project of living—especially amidst the present slow-motion apocalypse. The rabbit as prey animal is also a revealing choice of pet, as the family’s efforts to connect with it are stymied by the creature’s unceasing alertness to danger: “After a few days, he would permit some brief strokes of his head and nose, but even then, it was a reluctant surrender—a flinch followed by a slow melting of muscles, a hesitant closing of eyes.”
Significantly, the Lee family’s problems do not originate with the stresses of lockdown but instead begin several years earlier with the accidental death of Jin and Amy’s younger daughter, Ruby, a situation in which Amy’s mother, Pauline, plays a tragic role. As Jin observes, “Their lives had become unbearably stagnant, not just since the pandemic began (though that had made things worse) but in the years following Ruby’s death.” Readers likewise learn that Lucie’s secret habit of imagining gruesome worst-case scenarios precedes the actual worst-case scenario of her sister dying: “Lucie had already imagined her sister’s death countless times. Not in a wishful way—not at all. . . . But she had also listened to her parents speak about SIDS and seen the way her mother put her ear absurdly close to Ruby’s mouth to feel for breathing when she thought nobody was looking.” Many will resonate with the realization that the constant anticipation of death and loss is radically insufficient preparation for its reality.
The Burrow then becomes a story about how we deal with anxiety concerning the worst happening after having experienced the worst. As Cheng notes in a recent Read This podcast interview, it explores how we make sense of tragedy in the absence of a religious worldview, as is the case for the Lees, who are driven to search for cause and effect in their own actions. Jin turns to a form of “the magical thinking he’d had as a child. An irrational fear that if he got rid of something, it would somehow invite bad luck into his life.” Amy engages in self-recrimination,reflecting upon how her grief has inhibited her ability to help her surviving daughter cope with her own. “Another parent, a better parent, would have coaxed the grief from the shadows,” she thinks, after realizing that Lucie’s reluctance to name the rabbit might be linked to Ruby’s death. “A better parent would have exposed it. But not Amy. Amy had done what she always did. She had allowed the sorrow to lurk in the wings, gathering strength, while she stood in the open, weakly gesturing at it.”
Lucie, meanwhile, senses that her difficulty in processing her sister’s death is connected to being shielded from ever seeing Ruby’s body. She wonders, “If she’d seen her body, maybe Ruby’s death would have felt like something that had happened in real life, instead of just another one of her intrusive fantasies . . . then maybe every morning when she woke up, she would have felt the gravity of her sister’s passing like a heavy stone upon her chest.” Only Pauline—the character closest to death herself—is more preoccupied by her concern for her daughter and her family. Yet she is inhibited from reaching out more fully by her worry that her daughter still blames her for Ruby’s death and by long-standing family dynamics. At one point, Pauline has “a sudden urge to touch her daughter, to enfold her in her arms. But they were not the type of family to engage in such shows of affection, and so instead she said, ‘I can stay a little longer. Help you out. With Lucie. With everything.’”
Cheng’s brief, propulsive chapters rotate primarily among the four human characters using a roving close third person point-of-view, charting the astounding distances remaining between them despite their heightened proximity. These chapters are interspersed with occasional omniscient interludes focused on the rabbit, who is eventually named Fiver after a character in Watership Down. Intriguingly, these vignettes focus as much on what Fiver doesn’t perceive as on what he does:
If he were able, if he were not enveloped in cardboard, the rabbit would have observed the car pulling up in front of a single-story house blanketed in a bright blue tarp. He would have seen the front yard—a dusty grassless square covered in piles of bricks like burial mounds—and he would have spotted the rosebush with its crimson buds bursting through a nest of thorns. . . . But the rabbit saw none of these things.
This example is emblematic of Cheng’s prose style, which is understated yet precise in its selection of detail and exploration of the gaps in the characters’ perceptions. Here, what the rabbit cannot see is relayed in the terms in which the rabbit would have perceived it, and as a result, the reader is permitted a fresh glimpse of the Lee’s home from the rabbit’s neutral perspective. These passages are among the most evocative in the book; I would have loved for them to be more numerous and for Fiver to have been as fully developed a character as are Jin, Amy, Lucie, and Pauline.
Apart from Fiver’s sections, the novel quickly establishes a pattern of cycling through Jin, Lucie, Amy, and Pauline’s perspectives several times in sequence. A lesser novelist would have continued this pattern for the duration, but just past the book’s midpoint, Cheng effectively introduces variations permitting the story to follow a more organic path. Ultimately, she leads us to an ending just unexpected enough to be satisfying, while simultaneously resisting the pull of a tidier resolution.
Though the pandemic may now feel relatively distant, its reminder of how quickly catastrophe can become an everyday fact of life persists. In such a world, where the only real certainty is the inevitability of loss, Cheng’s novel invites us to consider: will we be like the rodent-creature in Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow,” from which she takes her epigraph, consumed and effectively immobilized by a flurry of activity fundamentally controlled by anxiety and dread? Or is it possible, despite our grief and fear, to still adopt a rabbit?
