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

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Then she walks home to eat, take care of the administrative tasks that come with publishing a book and, most important, write. And rewrite. She’s working on her second novel, “Honeydew,” which will be published next year. Tess Gunty has written a creative-debut-novel that is both taxing and complicated. … reminding us that life is messy. Seven years ago, when Tess Gunty began to write her debut novel, “The Rabbit Hutch,” she was 23, living in New York and experiencing a constant barrage of catcalls when she walked down the street. 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” 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.

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. And then there were the stories people told me about growing up in South Bend, which were very present to me as I wrote. My father grew up outside Chicago and my mother’s family settled in Northern California, so I learned about the history of my town through other people. Throughout high school, I worked at a bread bakery, and every weekend I operated its stand at the local Farmer’s Market. There, people would stop at my booth and tell me the stories of their lives, sometimes for hours; I was honored and surprised by their trust. The voices of these people—most of whom were elderly, left behind by family and friends, failed by structures that were only beginning to become visible to me—took up residence in my mind and never left, expanding my understanding of our collective home, the infinite lives available there, the patterns detectable among them.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. 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. If we drove through Vacca Vale, Indiana—the fictional town where The Rabbit Hutch takes place—what would we see?

Hodges, Dylan Lee (August 1, 2022). "Down The Rabbit Hole With Tess Gunty". Indianapolis Monthly . Retrieved October 31, 2022. Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.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.” 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? It was the first time since 2019 that the event was held in person and hundreds gathered at Cipriani Wall Street in downtown Manhattan. The author and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi hosted the ceremony, which also featured taped introductions by Keanu Reeves, Alicia Keys and Jimmy Fallon for nominees in competitive categories. 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! Its not a plot-driven novel … (somewhat a coming-of-age novel)…but rather it creates an environment that makes us think about ideas.

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. 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.)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. Gunty was fortunate too to have a father who worked at Notre Dame: Tuition was free. “I never would have chosen to stay in my hometown if I had a choice,” she says, laughing. She considered becoming a journalist, but the school didn’t offer a program, so she studied creative writing. In some ways, writing fiction “was a fate that was decided by accident.”