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

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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. Its not a plot-driven novel … (somewhat a coming-of-age novel)…but rather it creates an environment that makes us think about ideas. 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 Mannion, Una (August 23, 2022). "The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty: An important American novel about a dying city". The Irish Times . Retrieved 2022-10-11.

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. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. 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: Ambitious . . . Despite offering a dissection of contemporary urban blight, the novel doesn’t let social concerns crowd out the individuality of its characters, and Blandine’s off-kilter brilliance is central to the achievement.” — The New YorkerFrom 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. Sheehan, Dan (August 26, 2022). "Tess Gunty has won the inaugural Waterstones debut fiction prize". Literary Hub . Retrieved October 12, 2022.

the fictional characters are unique —grumpy- obsessed -pessimistic - vulnerable - violent- extreme- flawed -lonely - isolated - powerful - powerless …..deeply struggling - Elsie, the book’s former child star, writes in her auto-obituary: “Everything affects everyone.” If the novel had a thesis statement, that would be it, Gunty says. For all its dread and isolation, “The Rabbit Hutch” is a story about being simultaneously interconnected and interdependent, one whose ending forges a bond between two characters who believed they were alone. Brilliant . . . Tess Gunty has the scope and acuity of David Foster Wallace, without the obscurantism and wilfully slow pace . . . With her sophisticated analyses of modern culture, Blandine occasionally fails to sound like an authentic teenager; but I’m fully persuaded the brilliant Gunty was once exactly the same.”— Suzi Feay, Financial Times, “The Best Debut Fiction” One of the most talked about debuts of the year so far, Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutchfeels like a cult classic in the making.” —i-D Tess Gunty [has an] evocative way with words . . . Gunty treats The Rabbit Hutchlike a wall of glass cages at a pet store and we readers are voyeuristic shoppers peering in. . . . If you scratch away the layers of surrealism and satire, you find Gunty’s practical insight into the meaning of life. It’s complicated, hard as hell, and yet beautiful. At its core, The Rabbit Hutchasks us to question what it means to be alive, especially in the age of the internet.” — Oprah Daily

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” 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. She goes on to suggest xeriscaping and condemn logging. She censures the plan for failing to eliminate car-dependence, and points out that the proposed public transit system does not reach the low-income neighborhoods of Vacca Vale. The plan proposes no efforts to redress the food deserts and underfunded schools in those districts. She calls the tram through the Valley is “essentially decorative,” as it does not connect to the transit center downtown. There’s no outline for bus routes, and the proposed train system caters to the geographic needs and the social exclusivity of the suburban communities in the Northwest, along with the needs and preferences of the incoming tech communities who will settle in the Valley, doing little for the residents whose families have been in Vacca Vale for generations—the people that the revitalization is supposed to revitalize.

A first novel of uncommon power . . . A character-driven marvel . . . This is fiction that feels completely new while also pulling together dark impulses and base instincts that are familiar to every one of us. Gunty is doing a lot, and it’s all working. The Rabbit Hutchis a singular and piercing story.” —Heather Scott Partington, Alta As I read this I was thinking to myself, this is good but not great. Nearing the end, though, I recognized that I had been captured by the story, the characters and particularly the prose. I realized that despite some flaws, four stars was not where this novel belonged, and I gave it five (my fourth five-star read in a row; that has never happened to me). Why did I change my mind? There was so much to enjoy. The structure of the novel, which focused on the residents in an affordable housing complex named The Rabbit Hutch (the name is in French, so it sounds more upscale), fit the story well. We meet the residents of various apartments and follow some of them consistently while others disappear until the end of the story, which frustrated me. Harris, Elizabeth A. (October 4, 2022). "Here Are This Year's National Book Award Finalists". The New York Times . Retrieved November 17, 2022. After four years of toiling in New York, Gunty and her partner, an urban designer, moved to downtown Los Angeles in 2019. When the pandemic shutdown hit in 2020, they relocated to Silver Lake, mostly because she missed trees. 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)

Think Jennifer Egan’s Look at Meand Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. . . The language of The Rabbit Hutchis so spectacularly clear. . . . [I did] not want to put down The Rabbit Hutchand leave these characters.” —Miwa Messer, B&N’s Poured Over With her second collection, ‘Girls That Never Die,’ poet Safia Elhillo dives headlong into cultural taboos and feels poised for a breakthrough. Tess Gunty's novel 'The Rabbit Hutch' wins National Book Award for fiction". NPR. November 16, 2022 . Retrieved November 17, 2022. 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. The dinner benefit for the National Book Foundation, which presents the awards, also included an honorary prize for Tracie D Hall, executive director of the American Library Association. Hall remembered childhood trips with her grandmother to the local library in the Watts section of Los Angeles, a building she likened to a cathedral and benefactor that permitted her to borrow as many books as she and her grandmother could carry.