LitPick Review
“Harvey’s Hutch” by Philip Dodd is a charming memoir about Philip Dodd’s life. It’s not an autobiography like the typical life story that tells you all about a person’s great achievements and impact on the world. Dodd tells his life through memories, which he presents through “mirrors” as if we are reliving his life with him. He does not write to impress. In fact, his memoir is not at all about his impact on the world but about life’s impact on him. With his lyrical writing and his simple style, Dodd tells us a captivating life story about how a pivotal event in younger years can impact irrevocably on older years. Four-year-old Phil finds that his beloved rabbit Harvey has disappeared in the night through a hole in the wire mesh of his hutch that Phil’s father built. As Dodd writes himself, “At its root, my memoir is a love story, of how a four-year-old boy came to love his pet, his white rabbit.” What will impress you are his simple anecdotes, his philosophies on life, and his deep humility.
Opinion:
“I had a happy childhood, but it has a hole,” writes Dodd. His memoir is this love story about a four-year-old boy who loved a pet white rabbit. And that rabbit was stolen in the night or escaped somehow through the wire mesh in his hutch. The rabbit is gone and isn’t coming back. He writes just a page later about holes in life and in things, “Once you know it is there, it is there. Things cannot be as they were before.” Some people have horrible childhoods; Philip Dodd did not. And while this pivotal event with Harvey shaped him and the rest of his life, it didn’t shatter that boy or the man. There are parts of this memoir that read as though the author is very sad, even depressed. But most of it is a delightful story of the ordinary. Everyone has holes in their lives. Everyone has people and things that we love that we lose. Death steals our loved ones away. War steals our loved ones away. Even COVID (which features in the latter part of this memoir) had a way of keeping us apart from our loved ones. That deep desire to love and be loved is most basic to humanity. Two verses from the Bible that come to my mind are from 1 John 4:10-11: “In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” It’s another simple truth. But that kind of love fills all the holes like no other love can.
