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

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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! The Rabbit Hutch is one of those books that you dread having to put down. It couldn't have been harder to do had the Kindle been superglued to my hands. My main problem with The Rabbit Hutch was that a significant portion of it seemed unnecessary and largely unrelated to the larger plot. Very few of the many perspectives are essential to the main story being told. For instance, what was the purpose of the mother’s sections? We spend significant time with her, but her story scarcely overlaps with the other characters’. To be fair, I read this book primarily for enjoyment rather than analysis, so it is possible that I missed a few of the connections, but as a casual reader, I finished this book wondering what the point was of including certain sections. This was even the case for the primary perspectives. For instance, one character receives a message on his mental health blog from a man who keeps finding weapons from the game Clue around his house and doesn’t know where they are coming from. We spend an entire chapter on this man’s story, and as far as I can tell, it never comes up again. It just seemed like Gunty had a fun idea for a psychological thriller she never intended to write and didn’t want it to go to waste. The realm of imagination and exploration in these stories made me think of David Foster Wallace — whose dense work included a look at the darkness of American culture. John Freeman, an editor at Knopf who taught a course on building stories at NYU, remembers that Gunty listened in class more than she spoke.

In The Rabbit Hutch, Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies—the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations.” —Raven Leilani, author of Luster I think she’s an extremely principled person who is interested in acting on her principles, without performing, and finding ways to make her immediate environment a more just place,” Gunty says. “I don’t think anything she does is guaranteed to work and she knows that … and yet she resists anyway, and that is extremely hopeful to me.”Blandine, who is obsessed with martyred saints, is the heroine Gunty always wanted to see — not just as a child, but now, as an adult. Greenblatt, Leah (August 2, 2022). "One Apartment Building, Many Lives". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved October 30, 2022. I protested the Church and its hypocrisy whenever I could with the kind of life-or-death energy you devote to ideologies when you’re young. I was ashamed of almost everything in those days, but I was never ashamed when I publicly confronted a priest about the Church’s sexism, which I did every chance I got, even when it made my peers ashamed on my behalf. When I discovered the countless ways the Church was hurting my friends—some had been abused by priests; some spurned in their communities when their parents divorced; some were rejected for their sexuality; some had to drop out of high school, suffer public humiliation, and give birth against their will because they were denied birth control first and abortion second—my rejection of the Church became absolute. I explained this rejection to my parents, but they continued to force me to attended church every Sunday, so I stopped accepting communion. Once, I tried to stay in the vestibule of the church, but my father threatened me, and that’s when I knew that my parents’ insistence on my Catholicism wasn’t just about faith; it was an assertion of their dominance over my body and mind. Naturally, this made me double-down. On the flip side of the obtusely weird, there was the eye rollingly cliche. Blandine, in many ways, was a manic pixie dream girl x 10,000. Gunty handed this character all the damage one could imagine as well as a preternatural intelligence and obsession with the mystic. You know the kind of character I mean and how exhausting it can be. I don't think I need to say anything else in that regard. But despite Notre Dame’s existence, countless people were still left behind when the automobile industry closed; not everyone can transition from a job at a factory to one at a private university. Some families didn’t recover for generations. Many are still recovering.

In her acceptance speech, Gunty cited recent comments made by poetry nominee Sharon Olds about literature's essential role in society. Gunty called books a path to calling attention to those "neglected" and otherwise not visible. I added it to my tbr because I was intrigued by the cover, the prison yard tattoo look of it. Maybe that's not the best reason to read a book but I'll admit I judge books by their covers and, at least with this one, it paid off. Most of my favourite contemporary writers are not strictly novelists, but two novelists I do really admire are Zadie Smith, just because she gives herself a completely new challenge with every book that she writes and she’s constantly refining her thinking, and Yuri Herrera, who’s a Mexican writer, and everything I have read by him is just perfect. It’s the thing I’m actually most drawn to. Contemporary poetry right now is so exciting, and it’s the work that always makes me want to write.a b Greenblatt, Leah (2022-08-02). "One Apartment Building, Many Lives". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2022-10-11.

There was something about this practice that made otherworldly realms seem material to me, something about the prayer that built a bridge between my city and the afterlife, and I began to feel like the two places were bonded. Even though I was starting to detach from the zealous Catholicism of my youth, I still felt an obligation to say the prayer. Sometimes I’d find myself reciting it almost unconsciously. An ambitious debut . . . With hints of Rachel Kushner ( The Flamethrowers) and Ali Smith ( How to Be Both), Gunty’s writing is richly detailed and poignant.” —Sarah Stiefvater, PureWow For reasons both explicit and suggested throughout the course of the novel, Blandine has spent most of her life longing for escape—escape from her town, escape from her body. She’s taken refuge in books, because they are a free and accessible way to travel. Blandine has a roving, exuberant mind of fused contradictions, and she enjoys immersing herself in other roving, exuberant minds of other fused contradictions. When we meet her, she’s developed a fascination with the Catholic female mystics, and while she finds much to admire and contemplate in their work, many these figures are submissive and timid, or at least present as such. While Hildegard occasionally does, too, such performances usually seem engineered to manipulate the male clergy; she can’t conceal her ferocity. This is one thing that sets Hildegard apart: somehow, even when she’s apologizing, she unapologetically embodies authority. She expresses more of the active sorcery we associate with witches than the passive reception we associate with female saints. Tess Gunty is a masterful talent with a remarkable eye for the poetic, the poignant, and the absurdly sublime. The Rabbit Hutchunspools the story of Blandine Watkins and other inhabitants of a rundown building on the edge of the once bustling Vacca Vale, Indiana. A brutal and beautiful novel that both delights and devastates with its unflinching depiction of Rust Belt decline, Gunty’s debut is a tour de force that’s sure to top this year’s best-of lists.” —Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy Philosophical, and earthy, and tender and also simply very fun to read—Tess Gunty is a distinctive talent, with a generous and gently brilliant mind.” —Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

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Wallace was incredibly brilliant, artistic, an almost ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ talent, clinically depressed, and a sad loss when he took his life. 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. From a young age, Gunty was keenly aware of the socioeconomic disparities of her hometown, one inspiration for Vacca Vale. Because her mother was an art teacher at a Catholic high school, Gunty attended the expensive school for free.