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

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Harris, Elizabeth A. (October 4, 2022). "Here Are This Year's National Book Award Finalists". The New York Times . Retrieved November 17, 2022. This leads me to another point. The novel is set in the dying town of Vacca Vale, Indiana, after the automobile industry has dried up and disappeared. A familiar story across the United States and elsewhere, no doubt. I couldn’t help but think of The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry, a book I read and greatly admired just one month ago. There we were firmly planted in the decaying town of Thalia, Texas, right along with its desperate and lonely characters. The characters in The Rabbit Hutch were just as hopeless, struggling to find connections. But somehow I believed in them quite a bit more in McMurtry’s book than in this one. Maybe it was because here the author, despite her skill with words, tried to do a bit too much. Too many characters, too bizarre, and more disjointed. Some storylines fizzled out, while the main one reached a crescendo that I did actually find “rewarding” though very disturbing. And the last section did reveal to me that Tess Gunty is onto something very intuitive here. I would love another story with a smaller cast of characters and one that heavily features Joan, the mousy, insecure, middle-aged resident of the apartment complex that I found super intriguing – and genuinely written!

Blandine, whose story is central to the novel, desperately wants to exit her body. What exactly does that mean to her? A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.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 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.) Much of The Rabbit Hutch focuses on Blandine’s loneliness and search for happiness as she drifts through her city, interacting with customers at the diner, her roommates, Joan in C2, and a music teacher. Although a high-school dropout, Blandine is an intellectual who reads Dante in her spare time and finds inspiration in the work of Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen: “The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed!” Blandine’s favorite place is one worthy of Bingen herself, the fittingly named Chastity Valley. It’s an orientation point, a place where Blandine can get her bearings:

Vacca Vale is a patchwork of the Rust Belt towns I know: Gary, Indiana; Flint, Michigan; Youngstown, Ohio. There was a powerful purgatorial sensation that would invade me as soon as I approached a town that had suffered a similar economic fate as my own, South Bend, and this novel was my effort to conjure that sensation in language. It’s like wearing cold damp clothes in the basement of a building where it is always 4 p.m. Low ceilings, beige everything. A doorless, windowless waiting room with no one at the desk and no distractions. You just have to sit on a metal chair until your name is called. When writing The Rabbit Hutch, I wanted to create an otherworldly place that wasn’t perfectly bound to the governing rules of so-called reality, a fundamentally unstable environment that summoned eccentricities, crimes, ghosts. I set the novel in a fictional city because I needed to be free of geographic likeness so that I could better evoke emotional likeness. Hildegard is the first thinker that Blandine has encountered who personifies her highest aspirations: Hildegard possesses an omnivorous curiosity, a polyphonous identity, an ecstatic devotion to nature, access to the supernatural, and a radiant spiritual energy that can withstand systemic abuse and physical illness. In Hildegard’s life and work, Blandine glimpses her most intimate values operating at high volume in another person. Only now—six years after beginning my novel—does it occur to me that The Rabbit Hutch is my secular prayer for the souls trapped in earthly purgatories, an effort to liberate myself and others from the waiting room. As I grew up, it became clear that the story of my hometown was the story of countless places—geographic and psychological—across the Midwest, across America, across the world. I wrote the novel for everyone who has spent time in such a place, for everyone who’s still there. I hope this novel provides welcome company to the reader who has known sustained and aimless longing, a desire to escape a place or a depression or a time or a law or a relationship or a body. I hope it enchants and delights and moves and awakens, as all my favorite writing does for me. I hope it offers an occasion to laugh, to think, to feel less alone. I hope it delivers the reader, as it delivered me, into a more compassionate and luminous place. The whole time I read [ The Rabbit Hutch], I was thinking, is this as good as I think it is? And I got a bunch of people on my team and friends to read it and the consensus is yes, it really is that good on a sentence level. [Gunty] is a writer who kind of breaks reality open with her metaphors and her sentences and lets you see things a little bit differently. It’s a truly exciting book.” —Sarah McNally, Gothamist, “The Best Books of Fall 2022”The form is really interesting. The book begins with the main character Blandine, referencing some point in the future when she would "leave her body," but without further explanation. The countdown continues throughout the narrative. It's clever, and shores up what would otherwise be a flaccid plot. But this book is trying to do way too much; it all seems like it's trying to distract from itself.

As the rest of The Rabbit Hutch unfolds, the reader learns more about the music teacher, encounters several scenes of animal sacrifice, and witnesses the bizarre behavior of a former child actor’s son. But it is the activities of the four teenagers in apartment C4—especially one night after Blandine brings home an injured goat—that are at the heart of the book. Sheehan, Dan (August 26, 2022). "Tess Gunty has won the inaugural Waterstones debut fiction prize". Literary Hub . Retrieved October 12, 2022. I didn’t find myself connecting with any of the characters, even (and especially) Blandine, and much of the dialogue did not seem realistic to me. For instance, Blandine’s final confrontation with James does not sound like how a real teenager would talk! Often, it seemed as if the author had a personal interest in a certain topic, such as moral philosophy, and shoehorned it into a conversation where it wouldn’t otherwise be relevant. 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 In the years Foer has known Gunty, he has come to seek out her advice. “She is one of three people I go to when I need an idea that I can’t come up with on my own, when I am puzzled and seeking clarification about something in the world, when I simply want a wise opinion,” he added.An astonishing portrait . . . Gunty delves into the stories of Blandine’s neighbors, brilliantly and achingly charting the range of their experiences. . . . It all ties together, achieving this first novelist’s maximalist ambitions and making powerful use of language along the way. Readers will be breathless.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Along with Walk the Vanished Earth, Sea of Tranquility and Trashlands, The Rabbit Hutch will likely be one of my favourite novels of 2022. The sensation that disturbs Blandine most profoundly as she walks across her small city is that of absence … Empty factories, empty neighborhoods, empty promises, empty faces. Contagious emptiness that infects every inhabitant. Vacca Vale, to Blandine, is a void, not a city. Anderson, Hephzibah (July 16, 2022). "Tess Gunty: 'I was an almost freakishly devout child' ". the Guardian . Retrieved October 26, 2022.

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]

Gunty writes with such compassion for her characters as they build their lives and assert their agency in a country that utterly disregards them, and in particular Blandine’s bright, fierce curiosity for the world kept me moving through the story; she’s a warrior, an intellectual force, a young woman who refuses to be disempowered. This is a skillfully told, beautiful, human story.” —Corinne Segal, Literary Hub, “35 Novels You Need to Read This Summer”