The Rabbit Hutch: A Novel (National Book Award Winner)

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A] bizarre, enticing story . . . Addictive . . . This is a novel for both the hopeless and hopeful, and though Gunty does not spare us from the violence of humanity, she understands that it does not define us exclusively. As a writer, Gunty is both deft and versatile. Though she may be unknown to most of her readers, The Rabbit Hutchalready feels like something only Tess Gunty could write.” —Mara Sandroff, Newcity Lit By the time I was 15 I started vehemently rejecting it, and my entry point into that rejection was a growing awareness of the patriarchal structure of it, and then all of the abuse scandals. I wanted to get as far away as I could from the Catholic church, so I was very surprised to see the presence of Catholicism in my work, especially as it wasn’t laced with nearly as much bitterness and resentment as I expected. Greenblatt, Leah (August 2, 2022). "One Apartment Building, Many Lives". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved October 30, 2022. The Rabbit Hutchaches, bleeds, and even scars but it also forgives with laughter, with insight, and finally, through an act of generational independence that remains this novel’s greatest accomplishment, with an act of rescue, rescue of narrative, rescue from ritual, rescue of heart, the rescue of tomorrow.” —Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves Later, when Freeman went on to read “The Rabbit Hutch” and eventually become its editor, he was “dazzled” by Gunty’s range of voices and her “ability to write on the spirit level while also writing about urban decay. ... I think it’s unusual, to put it mildly, that a book with such dazzling architecture and depth of spiritual insight should come at the very beginning of a writer’s life, so I can only imagine what’s going to come next for her. It fills me with a great anticipatory happiness.”

Publishers Weekly ultimately named The Rabbit Hutch one of the top ten books of 2022, regardless of genre. [18] Awards for The Rabbit Hutch Year The Rabbit Hutchfollows a series of characters endowed with idiosyncrasies as bizarre as they are fascinating. . . . As with the best polyphonic novels, the town of Vacca Vale becomes a character in and of itself—its deterioration takes turns mirroring or standing in sharp contrast to the psychologies of Gunty’s characters.” — Annabel Graham, Bomb The central focus of the story is Blandine, formerly named Tiffany, a very intelligent 18-year-old high school dropout. I really liked Blandine. I was attracted to her struggle to find meaning in life, her willingness to search in many directions, her unwillingness to accept easy answers and the peace she occasionally found in nature and the outdoors. I struggled at times as to whether Blandine was an 18-year-old I could believe existed, given her opinions and how she expressed them. I have never met an 18-year-old that bright and articulate, but then I thought that just because someone doesn’t fit within what I consider a normal range of intelligence doesn’t mean they don’t exist—at least I hope not. Multiple reviewers commented on Gunty's writing skill. Publishers Weekly said Gunty "mak[es] powerful use of language along the way." [10] Booklist expanded on the sentiment, writing, "The brilliantly imaginative novel begins on an absurdist note before settling down to an offbeat, slightly skewed realism. Gunty is a wonderful writer, a master of the artful phrase." [7] The Boston Globe highlighted how "Gunty weaves [characters'] stories together with skill and subtlety. The details ... are slipped in via a very few well-chosen details." [14] The Times said, "The writing is incandescent, the range of styles and voices remarkable ... The novel leaps with great confidence across a multitude of styles." [15]As the novel unfolds, we learn that the local government in Vacca Vale is soon to begin construction on a revitalization plan, designed to turn Vacca Vale “from a dying postindustrial city into a startup hub, attracting talent from around the world.” The developer at the helm of the project is quoted in the local paper: “Urban revitalization plans have failed countless residents in the past. But we won’t fail you.” What would failure look like for the residents of the Rabbit Hutch? Are they already failed from the start? From a 21st-century perspective, Hildegard is far from the progressive feminist icon that both Blandine and I would like her to be. Blandine understands that Hildegard is, despite everything, a woman of her time. In her writing, Hildegard explicitly promoted classism, homophobia, transphobia, and sexism. She accepted only aristocratic women into her convent, in part because she was a savvy businesswoman and needed the dowries to build her empire, but also because she herself was born to a noble family and believed God wished for the classes to remain distinct (although, she added, He loves them all equally). Much of her work is wonky, incompressible, and scientifically erroneous. But she was alive in 12th-century Germany, she was a woman, and her pulpit was inside the Catholic Church. If she had been truly radical, the pope would have excommunicated her, as he did many Catholic rabble-rousers of the day. The story begins with what we can make out is an act of violence being committed in apartment C4. The narrative takes us through the preceding week and the events in the days leading up to that fateful night. The story predominantly centers around eighteen-year-old Blandine Watkins, recently aged out of the foster care system, a high school dropout and employed in a local diner, presently sharing apartment C4 with three young men, all of whom were once in the foster care system. Blandine once had a promising academic record and was expected to attend college on scholarship but dropped out of high school after an inappropriate relationship with a teacher shattered her already fragile sense of self-worth. She is fascinated with the lives of Christian female mystics, hoping to someday enjoy the experience of Transverberation of the Heart as described by the mystics she frequently reads about. Blandine has not had an easy life and it seems that she is caught up in a vicious cycle of despair and disappointment and her fixation with the lives of the mystics seems not only to be cathartic for her but also lends her a purpose in life. She loves her hometown despite its current state of economic decline and actively opposes the modernization initiatives proposed by local developers. Blandine is a free spirit, a rebel in a small dying Midwestern town, who's seen more sh-t than have the three twerp guys she takes up with, who've taken up a progressingly violent game. The story escalates and escalates, with Blandine's involvement with the young men, and the young men's obsession with their game, gaining more complication and significance as the book progresses. THE RABBIT HUTCH is a slow burn, no thriller, this one. I think the inventive form helps keep it moving, but also emphasizes how contrived the plot is. I’ve been writing fiction pretty obsessively since I was a child, and when I was young I thought that the absence of the rust belt in fiction was a good reason to never set my own work there. I always set it in some imagined land or a city I’d been to once. Then in my early 20s, I started to realise that the rust belt’s absence in fiction was a very good reason to set something there.

Throughout the course of the novel, we hear the voices of several tenants of the Rabbit Hutch, a run-down apartment building at the edge of town: a young mother who’s terrified of her newborn’s eyes, a widowed logger who’s taken to dating apps, an aging couple who keep finding dead mice on their balcony, a group of four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster care system. Whose voice came to you first? Whose voice was came to you loudest?

Once, when I attended a Ravel performance at the New York Philharmonic, the woman next to me—a native Manhattanite in furs—asked where I was from. I had half a draft of The Rabbit Hutch written at the time. When I replied Indiana, she gasped. I never would have guessed! she told me as if this were a compliment. You got the impression that she had never left the Upper West Side except to go to Europe; it was easy to imagine her with a judgmental Pomeranian and jewelry insurance. I didn’t know anyone was actually from Indiana! Did you turn the lights off when you left? Original and incisive . . . This is an important American novel, a portrait of a dying city and, by extension, a dying system. Its propulsive power is not only in its insight and wit, but in the story of this ethereal girl. . . . She is so vibrantly alive and awake that when I finished this book, I wanted to feel that. I wanted to walk outside. I wanted what is real. I wanted to wake up. Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is breathtaking, compassionate and spectacular.” —Una Mannion, The Irish Times I now appreciate growing up in a place where the brutality of industrial appetites was visible. My high school was situated across from a dog food factory, which paused production during school hours but was active in summers, when I had soccer practice twice a day. Running 8-miles of intermittent sprints in 99-degree heat with 100 per cent humidity through the pungent odor of fish guts is an experience you never forget. (I couldn’t resist placing a dog food factory across from Blandine’s high school in the novel.) In America’s popular, pricey, coastal cities, modes of production—the machines, chemicals, and labor that facilitate our conveniences—are mostly concealed. But in so many neglected regions of this country, the Anthropocene is visible everywhere you look. In a city like South Bend, the price of industrial convenience is one you pay, and the consequences are far more hazardous than a bad smell. The cancerous chemicals of coal mines, factories, and farms are in your soil, your water, your baby, your air. The extractive economy is visibly extracting from your family, making your parents sink in debt, making your sister infertile, turning your cousins into conspiracy theorists. Your childhood friend met his wife in treatment for opioid addiction. If we drove through Vacca Vale, Indiana—the fictional town where The Rabbit Hutch takes place—what would we see? An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents— neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana.

With her second collection, ‘Girls That Never Die,’ poet Safia Elhillo dives headlong into cultural taboos and feels poised for a breakthrough. Mesmerizing . . . A novel of impressive scope and specificity . . . One of the pleasures of the narrative is the way it luxuriates in language, all the rhythms and repetitions and seashell whorls of meaning to be extracted from the dull casings of everyday life. . . . [Gunty] also has a way of pressing her thumb on the frailty and absurdity of being a person in the world; all the soft, secret needs and strange intimacies. The book’s best sentences — and there are heaps to choose from — ping with that recognition, even in the ordinary details.” —Leah Greenblatt, The New York Times Book Review I wish I could say the ending was surprising, dramatic, meaningful, or anything at all, but by that point, I was so desperate for the whole thing to be over that any effect it could have had was well gone.

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It wouldn’t fit into the category of ‘hysterical fiction’ that [critic] James Wood defined a couple decades ago,” Foer says. “Rather, it is filled with a kind of infectious life-force. It fills a reader with joy and wonder.” (Wood coined “ hysterical realism” in 2000 to critique ambitious novels teeming with intertwined, sometimes outlandish plots but inauthentic characters.)