book review the rabbit hutch

One Apartment Building, Many Lives

In “The Rabbit Hutch,” Tess Gunty weaves together the daily dramas of tenants in a shabby Midwestern complex.

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• Aug. 2, 2022
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THE RABBIT HUTCH, by Tess Gunty

It’s all writers’ prerogative to kill their darlings, though it takes a certain élan to kill your actual protagonist on the first page — or at least send her sliding somewhere beyond this mortal plane, as Tess Gunty seems to in the opening of “The Rabbit Hutch”: “On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only 18 years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen.”

It’s one of many bold moves in Gunty’s dense, prismatic and often mesmerizing debut, a novel of impressive scope and specificity that falters mostly when it works too hard to wedge its storytelling into some broader notion of Big Ideas. The parameters of the story itself are confined almost entirely to a single summer week in the fictional Midwestern city of Vacca Vale, Ind. — one of those dying third-rate metropolises, whose tenuous grip on prosperity faded when its main industry, Zorn Automobiles, collapsed under a cloud of debt and ecological misdeeds several decades before.

Blandine is a child of Vacca Vale born and raised, if rarely cared for: an autodidact and eerie Valkyrie beauty, with her piles of well-thumbed tomes on 12th-century mystics and corn-silk halo of hair. There was a mother once, we are told in a few deftly sketched sentences, with a fateful oxycodone habit, and a father in jail; then a series of foster families. Now she works at a local diner heavy on avant-garde pie — flavors of the day include lavender lamb and banana charcoal — and shares a shabby apartment with three other aged-out foster kids, all troubled varieties of teenage boy.

It’s their building that the book takes its title from: Originally designed to house Zorn laborers and christened La Lapinière in an act of misplaced faith and European flair, it’s now a run-down complex that no one ever really refers to as anything other than the Rabbit Hutch. The walls there “are so thin, you can hear everyone’s lives progress like radio plays,” and Gunty passes through them with a God’s eye, dipping in and out of units like C12, where a 60-something widower furtively checks his ratings on a dating website, and C10, where an aspiring influencer vamps, ready for his close-up. An elderly couple in C6 play out age-old patterns of low-level domestic strife in a cigarette-smogged living room while Hope, the fragile young mother in C8 struggling to bond with her newborn, finds comfort in reruns of a golden-age sitcom called “Meet the Neighbors.”

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The death of the show’s former star, an apple-faced American sweetheart named Elsie Blitz, comes as hard news to Hope, though it allows the book to leap to Malibu, where adult Elsie reigned for decades as a passionate benefactor of the endangered three-toed pygmy sloth, and a far less devoted parent to her only child, Moses Robert Blitz. Elsie is a familiar archetype but a well-drawn one: the perfect Hollywood monster, so blithely dedicated to pleasure-seeking and stunted by fame that she’s raised a son whose entire persona, even in his early 50s, is shaped around hating her.

It will take a series of events incited by another Hutch resident, Joan Kowalski, to summon him to Vacca Vale, though Joan is hardly the kind of siren to lure a man and leave him smashed on the rocks of desire. At 40, “she has the posture of a question mark, a stock face and a pair of 19th-century eyeglasses. Her solitude is as prominent as the cross around her neck.” But she does work for an online obituary portal whose virtual memorial wall for Elsie provides the itchy, furious Moses with an outlet for the volcanic emotions he would never acknowledge as grief, and a reason to skip out on the funeral of the mother whose headlong narcissism left so little room for him.

His own quirks are numerous, and Gunty, who lives in Los Angeles, sets them cleverly against the self-regarding follies of show business and coastal elitism: the Olympic-level virtue signaling of guests at an art-world cocktail party; the looser mores of the Me Decade artists and libertines who once swirled around Elsie in her prime. (“Adoration and hatred — the only energies she knew how to dispense and accept.”) To Moses, Vacca Vale is little more than a Midwestern emptiness to project himself upon, “a wasteland of factories, construction and dead grass on Google Maps.” To Blandine, though, it’s a place of almost totemic weight — the only home she’s ever known, and one she’s determined to defend against an influx of local developers who equate prosperity with new-built condos, not trees and parks.

Her elaborate effort to sabotage those civic schemes becomes one of the novel’s less resonant threads, a stylistic outlier whose endgame never quite syncs up with the larger story. More germane, and more interesting, is how a girl capable of delivering vast soliloquies on medieval saints and late-stage capitalism came to be a high school dropout serving weird pies. Blandine, it’s eventually revealed, is not her birth name, and until fairly recently she was an academic standout, if not exactly a prom queen, at a local prep school pleased to take on a scholarship kid of her unusual I.Q. and sad back story.

Her reasons for leaving so abruptly before her senior year turn out to be a tale as old as time, or at least “Lolita” — though “The Rabbit Hutch” smartly reframes the depressing clichés of a vulnerable teenager and an older authority figure, in part by making them each so constantly aware of the roles they’re playing. 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’s writing is so rich with texture and subtext it can sometimes tip over into the too-muchness of a decadent meal or a Paul Thomas Anderson film. As with many new novelists, and a lot of veteran ones too, her longer monologues tend to come off less like the cadences of ordinary speech than the workshopped thoughts of a star student, placed between quotation marks. (Gunty earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from N.Y.U.)

But she 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: A social worker has “sunglasses that evoked particularly American things, like goatees and drive-through banks and NASCAR”; high school bathrooms “resemble bomb shelters: windowless constructions of cinder blocks painted the color of sharks.” Looming over all that, the fate of her body in the balance, is Blandine. For all her extraterrestrial prettiness and spooky, precocious gifts, she’s still a teenager — in some sense not fully cooked yet, if she’ll ever get to be. (It’s hard not to picture the actress Anya Taylor-Joy, should there ever be a casting call.) “The Rabbit Hutch”’s vibrant, messy sprawl can seem that way too, but its excesses also feel generous: defiant in the face of death, metaphysical exits or whatever comes next.

Leah Greenblatt is a critic at large at Entertainment Weekly.

THE RABBIT HUTCH , by Tess Gunty | 338 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $28

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The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty review – a riveting debut about love and cruelty

The ecstatic mingles with the banal in a novel about lives lived too close for comfort in an apartment block in rust-belt Indiana

“O n a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only 18, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen,” begins The Rabbit Hutch. “The mystics call this experience the Transverberation of the Heart, or the Seraph’s Assault, but no angel appears to Blandine. There is, however, a bioluminescent man in his 50s.”

So whatever happens next, you know that debut author Tess Gunty can nail an opening. What happens next is the gradual, chronology-hopping revelation of who Blandine is, what the mystics have to do with anything, how a glowing middle-aged male got himself involved in all this, and why so many human lives (and one goat) have converged on this one horrible moment.

The main setting is the Rabbit Hutch itself, the apartment block where Blandine exits her body. Its proper name is La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex in the city of Vacca Vale, Indiana – a rust-belt relic of a place that, having outlived its usefulness to the motor industry, has been left to decay. Nothing but a scattering of incongruously grand buildings and a poisoned water table remain as testimony to the glory days of the Zorn automobile company.

Zorn is an invention, and so is Vacca Vale, but the broad details are recognisable to anyone who knows a little about the malaise of America’s post-industrial heartlands, and especially to anyone who has seen Michael Moore ’s 1989 documentary Roger & Me, about the degradation of Flint, Michigan, after the withdrawal of General Motors. And to underline the parallel, Gunty opens her novel with an epigraph from that film.

The epigraph she chooses isn’t about economic decline, though, or the iniquities of capitalism. At least, not directly. It’s about rabbits, and it was spoken by Rhonda Britton, who was nicknamed “the bunny lady” after her appearance in the film. “If you don’t sell them as pets, you got to get rid of them as meat … If you don’t have 10 separate cages for them, then they start fighting. Then the males castrate the other males … They chew their balls right off.”

If that’s what happens to rabbits in a rabbit hutch, what’s going to be the result when you pack a bunch of humans into one? Gunty travels through the fraught consciousnesses that occupy the housing complex. The elderly bickering couple; the sadsack sixtysomething man who resents women with “an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument”; the young mother who is terrified by her baby’s eyes, with their “shrewd, telepathic, adult accusation” of her failure to bond.

These are lives lived too close for comfort and too remotely for care, and it’s a model for everyone’s problem in this novel, which is populated by people like the young mother who both seek love and feel it as a terrible imposition on their own psyches. “People are dangerous because they are contagious,” thinks one man. “They infect you with or without your consent.”

That’s even more the case when you’re a woman, with the kind of body that’s made to be occupied. A pregnant woman imagines herself as a building and the foetus inside her as a developer: “Room by room, he demolished her body and rebuilt it into his own.” Blandine rails against the female condition: “Her body contains goods and services, and people will try to extract those goods and services without her permission.” Of course she dreams of making her escape.

This is a novel that is almost over-blessed with ideas. Gunty doesn’t quite balance the pieces of her story – she has a winning impulse for digression, but she also seems anxious that you might forget about Blandine, and so never quite settles into her sidebars. The insistent nudges back to the main arc stop her novel from creating the sense of invisible clockwork that would make it perfectly satisfying.

At its best, though, The Rabbit Hutch balances the banal and the ecstatic in a way that made me think of prime David Foster Wallace. It’s a story of love, told without sentimentality; a story of cruelty, told without gratuitousness. Gunty is a captivating writer, and if she learns to trust her own talent, whatever comes next will be even better.

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Knopf, 2022

Contributor Bio

Wayne catan, more online by wayne catan.

• Stone and Shadow

The Rabbit Hutch

By tess gunty, reviewed by wayne catan.

Tess Gunty was raised in South Bend, Indiana, where she attended Catholic schools straight through college. In 2015, with a bachelor’s in English from Notre Dame under her belt, she moved to New York to study with Jonathan Safran Foer and Rick Moody at NYU. She brought with her a deep knowledge and love of the Rust Belt, which is apparent in her debut,  The Rabbit Hutch . The novel is littered with Midwestern imagery: abandoned warehouses; jetsam from the once booming Zorn Automobile Company; a verdant valley; and a diner for townies, where the eighteen-year-old protagonist, Blandine Watkins, works.

Gunty wastes no time grabbing the reader’s attention with this opening sentence: “On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body.” The why and wherefore are the questions Gunty will answer over the course of a masterfully orchestrated multivocal performance. Our curiosity is piqued with each page we read, thanks to a variety of clever narrative techniques: obituary comments, epistles, and a chapter comprised solely of black-marker drawings.

Of all the places Gunty turns her attention to, however, it’s the titular Rabbit Hutch that is most suggestive. The Rabbit Hutch is an affordable housing complex in fictitious Vacca Vale, Indiana, where Blandine lives with three teenaged boys who, like Blandine, have just aged out of foster care: Todd, Malik, and Jack, who is “wound to the wrong moral time zone.” A spinster, Joan Kowalski, lives in C2; she works at Restinpeace.com scanning obituaries for insulting comments. A mom named Hope, who has “a phobia of her baby’s eyes,” lives with her family in C8. Reggie, a former engineer for Zorn, and his wife, Ida, are in C6; these two septuagenarians have downgraded to apartment living after losing their house. Gunty evokes the loneliness of apartment living in Vacca Vale:

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.

In addition to unique characters, Gunty’s gift lies in capturing Vacca Vale’s character. The town exudes hopelessness—unemployment and crime are rampant, and it is ranked first on “ Newsweek’s annual list of Top Ten Dying American Cities.” The city once “had a pulse you could feel in Chicago,” but that was when Zorn was booming. Yet Vacca Vale also has a certain cultural vibrancy: home to many who have never lived elsewhere, the city has developed its own patois.

So when a New York City developer and his team make plans to revitalize the city, Blandine is understandably not happy and coordinates a protest involving voodoo dolls, fake blood, and animal bones to put a stop to it. Through Blandine, Gunty’s message is clear: if you build in the Rust Belt, keep true to its roots and ensure affordable housing so residents are not displaced.

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:

[Blandine] can feel her whole body relax as she descends into greenery. Over a thousand maple trees live in the valley. Deciduous, the sugar maples are astonishing in the autumn, carpeting the woods in crimson, plum, and cadmium yellow.

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.

The Rabbit Hutch is deeply researched, and it is obvious that Gunty has a deep love for the Midwest. Still, the sections about Hope and her baby would work better as a stand-alone short story. Despite this shortcoming, Gunty’s colorful cast of characters and description of Vacca Vale capture life in a run-down postindustrial Midwestern city. In her portrayal of Blandine and her three roommates, Gunty lays bare the emotional trauma foster children experience, as well as their desperate need to transition to a normal adulthood—which might mean leaving the Rabbit Hutch for greener pastures.

Published on November 4, 2022

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THE RABBIT HUTCH

by Tess Gunty ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2022

A stunning and original debut that is as smart as it is entertaining.

An ensemble of oddballs occupies a dilapidated building in a crumbling Midwest city.

An 18-year-old girl is having an out-of-body experience; a sleep-deprived young mother is terrified of her newborn’s eyes; someone has sabotaged a meeting of developers with fake blood and voodoo dolls; a lonely woman makes a living deleting comments from an obituary website; a man with a mental health blog covers himself in glow stick liquid and terrorizes people in their homes. In this darkly funny, surprising, and mesmerizing novel, there are perhaps too many overlapping plots to summarize concisely, most centering around an affordable housing complex called La Lapinière, or the Rabbit Hutch, located in the fictional Vacca Vale, Indiana. The novel has a playful formal inventiveness (the chapters hop among perspectives, mediums, tenses—one is told only in drawings done with black marker) that echoes the experiences of the building’s residents, who live “between cheap walls that isolate not a single life from another.” Gunty pans swiftly from room to room, perspective to perspective, molding a story that—despite its chaotic variousness—is extremely suspenseful and culminates in a finale that will leave readers breathless. With sharp prose and startling imagery, the novel touches on subjects from environmental trauma to rampant consumerism to sexual power dynamics to mysticism to mental illness, all with an astonishing wisdom and imaginativeness. “This is an American story,” a character hears on a TV ad. “And you are the main character.” In the end, this is indeed an American story—a striking and wise depiction of what it means to be awake and alive in a dying building, city, nation, and world.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-53466-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

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Tess Gunty’s Debut Sends Readers Down the Rabbit Hole

“The Rabbit Hutch” reflects on the surrealism of the everyday.

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There are approximately 68 mentions of rabbits throughout The Rabbit Hutch ’s 352 pages, conjuring images of everything from pulling rabbits from hats to falling down rabbit holes to Alice in Wonderland to the banal life of a pet rabbit. It speaks to Tess Gunty’s evocative way with words that she weaves these strands together in the span of one book and one sweltering summer week. The story begins with a killer (literally) first line: “On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only 18 years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen.” And so we tumble down the rabbit hole, Alice holding our hand along the way.

Apartment C4 nestles within a run-down complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana, a fictional city (though perhaps a nod to California’s infamous Vacaville) long ago abandoned by its primary industry, Zorn Automobiles. Vacca Vale is now wracked by environmental and economic woes. The complex—originally named La Lapinière (“The Rabbit Hutch”), in a stab at pseudo-European luxury—houses a multitude of characters whose mundanity borders on fascinating. There’s the grumpy widower in C12 who obsessively checks his negative dating app reviews; a bickering old couple in C6 struggling to remember why they’re together; the new mother in C8 who’s having trouble bonding with her baby; a single woman who spends her evenings eating maraschino cherries from a jar on her nightstand.

Gunty treats The Rabbit Hutch like a wall of glass cages at a pet store, and we readers are voyeuristic shoppers peering in. Unlike in the real world, we see every person’s dark, soft, and vulnerable parts, the things they keep hidden from everyone—perhaps even themselves. This sense of eerie omnipresence permeates the entire book, often flinging us from scenes in La Lapinière to other parallel story lines.

For instance, there’s an entire chapter dedicated to the self-written obituary of a glamorous, yet unhinged former child star, Elsie Blitz, whose blasé attitude toward being alive mirrored Blandine’s. In the obituary, she gives advice like “Beaver fur is overrated” and “Believe in ghosts, but not God, unless your conception of God is much like a ghost.” The only thing Elsie loved more than pygmy sloths was her son, Moses, although she never bothered to show it. Moses serves as the connection, eventually reaching Vacca Vale with a heart full of misguided revenge and a plan that involves a bag full of glow sticks.

But the story’s main focus lies on Blandine, a former foster kid who’s obsessed with ancient martyrs and mystics and—until recently—was a gifted high school student by another name. Blandine sometimes veers into that overdone manic pixie dream girl status—her three male roommates suddenly fall in love with her at the same time, for example—but most of the time she resembles a modern-day Alice, ejected from Wonderland and wondering why no one else has seen what she has seen. Gunty writes, “She was a fool for portals, willing to sign the thorniest contract—giants, isolation, tricksters, hunters, con-artist wolves, cannibalistic witches, anything—if it promised to transport her. There was no place like home because there was no home.”

Blandine is full of the angsty philosophical questions one would expect from a teenage loner. She asks one of her roommates, “I just…I want a life that’s a little more lifelike…don’t you?” The question The Rabbit Hutch attempts to answer is, what actually defines a life? As we come across medical marvels with phantom itches and mystics who miraculously survive death by lions, we also encounter the fragile break of a teenage heart and the furious grief of complicated mourning. There’s the dark side to the internet, as Blandine sees it, but also the refreshingly cordial comments on a post in a plant-lovers’ group. No matter how you spin it, life—the mundane and the fantastical—is a kaleidoscope of juxtapositions. In a dark confession cubicle, a priest reassures Moses, “It would be absurd to describe a whole person as good or bad. You’re just a series of messy, contradicting behaviors, like everyone else…as long as you’re alive, the jury’s out.”

The Rabbit Hutch: A novel

Social media (and probably Blandine, if she were on Twitter) colloquially jokes that humans are merely bags of meat; the implication being that we’re just messy, squishy, vulnerable blobs. Similarly, the characters in The Rabbit Hutch are all half-baked—not in the sense that they’re not fully fleshed-out characters, but that, like us, they’re humans rotating on this Earth for the first time, experiencing every emotion with violent force. They struggle, they make mistakes, they join communities, they feel unbearably lonely. This, Gunty muses, is the full spectrum of being human. The Rabbit Hutch is absurd, but 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 Hutch asks us to question what it means to be alive, especially in the age of the internet. Perhaps a deleted comment from its fictitious obituary website sums it up best: “There is nothing after this, ok? So don’t live like you have an Act III…I can’t reveal how I know, I had to sign an NDA…[but] these are your only minutes. What are you going to do with them?”

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The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty: An important American novel about a dying city

An original, insightful and witty debut about alienation during the slow, painful death of capitalism.

The Rabbit Hutch is an affordable housing complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana, a post-industrial city deep in the US’s Rust Belt. In apartment C12 an ageing logger scrolls through his one-star date ratings. “ This man is a tater tot ,” reads one comment. In C2, a lonely woman whose job is screening online obituary comments for “foul language” or “mean-spirited remarks” about the deceased chooses to ignore the disturbing sounds beneath her in C4, an apartment shared by three teenage boys and a strange and mesmerising teenage girl obsessed with female mystics, all of whom aged out of the foster care system on their 18th birthdays. In C6 a couple in their 70s deliberate on whether they should put a dead mouse in a trap outside the door of the young couple upstairs.

The Rabbit Hutch complex provides a metaphor for the narrative architecture of Tess Gunty’s original and incisive debut. Chapters are told by different characters in disparate forms and media, the stories interlinked through Blandine, one of the teenagers in C4. Born to an addicted mother, she has been shuffled through a series of foster homes. She is a polymath, intensely bright and curious but her education veered off course after the attentions of a music teacher. Blandine provides devastating, funny commentary on everything from literature and the environment to social media, gendered power dynamics and late capitalism.

When Blandine meets the woman from C4 in a laundromat at the start of the novel, she tells her, “We’re all just sleepwalking. Can I tell you something, Jane? I want to wake up. That’s my dream: to wake up.” Gunty shows us how we are sleepwalking, living in a distorted hyperreality where the real is replaced with its representations, “everybody influencing , everybody under the influence , everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile searching for proof that they’re loveable”. And while individuals sacrifice their realities to “algorithmic predators of late capitalism”, around us our environments are being destroyed.

Unlifelike life

In its efforts to revitalise itself, Vacca Vale is in the process of destroying a 500-acre park created during the 1918 pandemic, imagining that it will draw tech companies. “I want a life that’s a little more like life,” says Blandine to one of the other teenagers in her apartment who watches the tourism commercials about Vacca Vale’s revitalisation on his laptop over and over again and cries, the commercials riffing on concepts of home, something he has never known.

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Vacca Vale ranks first in Newsweek’s annual list of Dying American Cities. Gunty’s hometown of South Bend, Indiana, has also made the list and the story of Vacca Vale’s downturn not only echoes South Bend’s but countless other automobile cities in the Rust Belt. In Vacca Vale, the fictional Zorn Automobile Company poisoned the water supply with Benzene before they bankrupted the economy and took away pensions and insurance. “Zorn mutated the people” it was leaving behind, economically, psychologically and physically. “Zorn was why you saw your dad cry. Zorn was why you didn’t have a dad. Why he overdosed or dealt.”

Indiana’s state motto is Vacca Vale’s: The Crossroads of America, the slogan emblematic of both a geographical and historical crux, the juncture we find ourselves at right now. The acres of Indiana’s green corn and soybean crops mask the dust and drought. “This future is already materializing, and so now, when the land can sprout nothing else, it sprouts suburbia.” And the suburbia we have built is anti-pedestrian and pro-car. Sidewalks end where strip malls begin, their architecture cheap and “built to be temporary”.

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 who has been brutalised by a system over and over again and yet keeps trying to resolve and save it. 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.

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Briefly Noted

The Rabbit Hutch , by Tess Gunty (Knopf) . Although there are actual rabbits in this ambitious novel, the “Hutch” of the title is the name given to an affordable-housing complex by its residents, in a post-industrial Indiana town. Gunty zooms in and out of the apartments, pushing the lives inside toward a forceful and violent climax; her central character is a gifted though troubled teen who grew up with foster families, has dropped out of high school, and calls herself Blandine. (Obsessed with female medieval mystics, she takes the name of a French martyr.) 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.

Northern Paiutes of the Malheur , by David H. Wilson, Jr. (Nebraska). In 1879, the Northern Paiutes, a tribe living around the Malheur River, in Oregon, were forcibly removed from their reservation by the United States government. In this searing and painstakingly researched account, Wilson challenges the accepted story of their exile, which placed blame on their primary chief, Egan, for inciting hostilities against white settlers. Charting the Paiutes’ history—their beginnings as a tribe of “kin-cliques” without central leadership, their first encounters with settlers, and, finally, the Bannock War of 1878—Wilson argues persuasively that they were victims not only of land theft but of a misinformation campaign whose effects have lasted more than a century.

Sinkhole , by Juliet Patterson (Milkweed) . Mixing autobiography, academic psychology, and an ecological history of Kansas, Patterson, a poet, examines the suicides in her family, beginning with her father’s. (“The worst had already happened, so why not face it as best as I could?” she writes.) She also investigates the suicides of her grandfathers—one a fertilizer-plant worker, the other a coal miner. Although she doesn’t presume to know why these men ended their lives, her archival research points to lead exposure, alcohol dependence, and money problems as likely factors. The sinkholes she finds around Kansas, products of mining and erosion, become symbols not only of the abysses suicides leave behind but also of a hollowing out of America.

Sonorous Desert , by Kim Haines-Eitzen (Princeton) . Seeking to understand how early monasticism was shaped by the “emptiness” of the desert, the author, a scholar of early Christianity, set out to capture the sound of silence, making field recordings in the deserts of southern Israel and North America. The result, a meditative blend of history and travelogue (complete with QR codes that link to the recordings), brings the soundscape of the desert to life. Haines-Eitzen writes that hearing the nuances of desert noises requires a “deep listening” founded on inner quietness, and she evokes this state through tales of the desert fathers, such as St. Anthony (251-356), who spent decades tormented by the clamorous voices of demons before finally learning to tune them out.

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A review of The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty By Nancy Spiller Knopf 352 pages, Hardcover, $28.00, Aug 02, 2022, ISBN 9780593534663

Tess Gunty’s debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, opens with 18 year-old Blandine Watkins exiting her body while a “bioluminescent man in his fifties” runs towards her yelling. Discovering the who, what and why of this moment is the rabbit hole readers are dropped suddenly into. Immediate introductions to other sullen denizens of Blandine’s low income apartment complex, nicknamed The Rabbit Hutch, follow. It’s located in Vacca Vale, Indiana, named one of Newsweek’s Top Ten Dying Towns.   We meet a new mother who fears her baby’s eyes, a squabbling elderly couple, a spinster who monitors comments for an online obituary site (shades of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts ) and three creepy boys who have, like Blandine, aged out of foster care to become her roomies.  

Like a media debris flow of intelligent thoughts, wry observations and a head spinning parade of surprising images, The Rabbit Hutch is a vision of whimsical dread, as if preparing us for a future of both terror and tedium. Tom Robbins meets Don DeLillo. Fans of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation , with its swirling gyre of American stuff, may enjoy The Rabbit Hutch as much as I did.  

I was initially curious about all the hype surrounding the book’s publication. Did 29 year-old author Gunty, blonde, beautiful Indiana native with a New York University MFA, now living in Los Angeles, deserve all the fuss?

I was thrilled at how fast the pages turned, my attention for most books having been ruined by obsessive internet reading. Hutch was as much fun as any tumble into the depths of a hyper-linked article, hopping from one apartment to another, a laundromat for religious musings, a private school for children of the “decaying aristocracy” (where Blandine was a poor but brilliant scholarship student) and to a diner where she earns her keep serving quirky pies. An early chapter’s underlined words had me itching to tap the text to see where it led.  

Blandine, self-named for a martyred Christian saint, patron of young girls, does wax on about saints, their need for solitude, and her suspicions their ecstatic visions are a form of masturbation. She’s also an environmental terrorist, ruining with voodoo dolls and fake blood a wild game dinner held by developers threatening a cherished nearby valley. But like other of the book’s numerous threads, this one’s eventually dropped. As far as the sometimes murky plot goes, Blandine’s greatest challenges include the inappropriate attentions of James Yager, an older, married teacher at her private school, and the pathetic dopes she’s living with.  

But don’t read Hutch for the plot, read it for the language–seductive, entertaining and leading readers wonderfully astray. Insert your own line breaks and it can at times read like poetry, or a game of word pick up sticks. A throw away character is “a wonky Christian philanthropist—now a resident of Quebec.” The effect of Gunty’s linguistic pile ons are like a Wes Anderson movie. The phrase “Factory Farmed memoirs” nails an entire literary genre. Gunty offers a fresh techno take on sex with high school drama teacher Yager running “his hands over (Blandine’s) skin as if it were offering instruction in an emergency,” while post coital, she is “fragile and valuable like a cracked iPhone.”  

Coincidences pile up as paths crisscross. Elsie Blitz is the freshly deceased celebrity whose online obit Hutch resident Joan Kowalski must monitor for comments. As a young woman, Blitz played a daughter in “Meet the Neighbors,” the favorite show now watched religiously in reruns by the mother who fears her baby’s eyes. Joan must censor an outlandish comment by Elsie’s disgruntled son, Moses Robert Blitz (named for the New York City planner, Robert Moses, not the ten commandments guy), an act leading to a whole other set of unfortunate circumstances. The book captures our collective ADHD. Is this post legalized marijuana prose—or are we all just stoned on TMI?  

Gunty’s characters boast some of the odder in contemporary concerns. Moses is afflicted with that rare condition causing sufferers to believe fibers, not hair, are coming out of their skin. Obit monitor Joan has misophonia, the loathing of sounds like chewing, breathing, unwrapping paper or cellophane packages. And dead Elsie’s passion project was the three-toed sloth.  

I especially enjoyed Gunty’s habit of taking sentences too far, such as Moses Robert’s fondness for Middle America and “the canned corn that travels thousands of miles before returning to where it began.” At an airport gate “a sleeping toddler tips over his father’s coffee which the carpet absorbs in disturbing totality.” The world is presented here in its disturbing totality.  

I read with fascination, happy I’m not 18 anymore and wondering who I’d be if I had access to Wikipedia at that age. The book stumbles towards the end, when Blandine confronts Yager, her inappropriate lover. They sit in his car while she spews a meltdown monologue/raging Op-Ed. He fights limply back with self- flagellation. And let’s not forget the unfortunate cover, which looks like a depressed teen’s PeeChee folder doodle.  

The book’s major threads are tied up neatly. If there is a message, it’s that toxic masculinity needs to take a hike. All I will say about the ending is that it reminded me of the movie Taxi Driver, with its accidental hero. To say more would be to ruin the fun, so I’ll stop there, even if the marvelous Ms. Gunty doesn’t.  

About the reviewer:  Nancy Spiller is a writer, artist and educator living on Los Angeles’ wild western edge. She is the author of:  Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from My Mother’s Recipe Box. and  Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes) and teaches creative writing for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. This October 1-9, she will be teaching The Creative Cafe 2.0: Food & Writing on Zoom:  https://www.uclaextension.edu/writing-journalism/creative-writing/course/creative-cafe-20-food-writing-writing-x-4651e?fbclid=IwAR1tVU4qhi7h9BaEP6k2tWqCHv_NbpvyBOmhmXHGqgXGt595fVtLOMNBJqU More can be found at  http://nancyspiller.org .

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'The Rabbit Hutch,' a novel by Tess Gunty, wins National Book Award for fiction

Andrew Limbong

The literary world gathered in New York City Wednesday night for the National Book Awards. The recent rise in book bannings across the country hung over the celebration.

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The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

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Published Aug 2022 352 pages Genre: Literary Fiction Publication Information

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The Rabbit Hutch is a stunning debut novel about four teenagers - recently aged out of the state foster-care system - living together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest, exploring the quest for transcendence and the desire for love.

The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors an extraordinary fear. But C4 is of particular interest. Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster-care system: three boys and one girl, Blandine, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her. Now all Blandine wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads. Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents—especially Blandine—go to achieve it? Does one person's gain always come at another's expense? Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch is a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.

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Book Awards

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"Gunty debuts with an astonishing portrait of economically depressed Vacca Vale, Ind., centered on the residents of a subsidized apartment building nicknamed the Rabbit Hutch...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) "In the end, this is indeed an American story—a striking and wise depiction of what it means to be awake and alive in a dying building, city, nation, and world. A stunning and original debut that is as smart as it is entertaining." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Gunty is a wonderful writer, a master of the artful phrase...Best of all, her fully realized characters come alive on the page, capturing the reader and not letting go." - Booklist (starred review) "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 "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 "Just when everything seemed designed for a brief moment of utility before its planned obsolescence, here comes The Rabbit Hutch , a profoundly wise, wildly inventive, deeply moving work of art whose seemingly infinite offerings will remain with you long after you finish it. Each page of this novel contains a novel, a world." - Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated

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Author Information

Tess Gunty earned an MFA in creative writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Joyland, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, Flash , and elsewhere. She was raised in South Bend, Indiana, and lives in Los Angeles.

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The Rabbit Hutch

58 pages • 1 hour read

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The Rabbit Hutch (2022) is American writer Tess Gunty’s debut novel. It won the National Book Award for Fiction, the inaugural Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, and lauded American writer Jonathan Safran Foer praised it as a “profoundly wise, wildly inventive, deeply moving work of art” whose every page contains “a novel, a world” (1). Before writing her debut, Gunty earned her MFA in New York University’s MFA in Creative Writing program, where she was awarded the Lillian Vernon Fellowship, and her work was named “Most Outstanding Undergraduate Poetry Collection” at Notre Dame University in 2015. Her short fiction, nonfiction prose , and poetry have appeared in publications like Granta, Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, and The Iowa Review.

This study guide refers to the 2022 Oneworld Publications Kindle edition.

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CONTENT WARNING: The source text includes depictions of physical violence towards women and scenes of animal sacrifice.

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The novel begins with the scene where 18-year-old medieval-mysticism devotee Blandine Watkins exits her body, just as the mystics did. While no angel appears, “there is, however, a bioluminescent man in his fifties, glowing like a firefly” (8). During this moment, Blandine experiences a feeling of unity with the rest of Creation.

The narrative then jumps back to the few days before Blandine exits her body to give a panoramic view of both her life and the lives of her coresidents in the La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana. Although the protagonists barely know each other, their actions affect each other, as does the climate of economic decline and social neglect in their post-industrial town.

Intellectually brilliant, ethereally beautiful Blandine has turned her back on the promise of college or a future outside of Vacca Vale; an affair with her high-school music teacher James Yager left her disillusioned with formal systems of education. Instead, she is devoted to the idea of sabotaging the Vacca Vale development project, one that will see condominiums polluting the landscape of her beloved natural retreat, Chastity Valley. She does this by throwing a mass of animal skeletons and fake blood at one of the developers’ dinners. She is also obsessed with medieval mystics, particularly the 12th-century German Hildegard von Bingen, and wants to experience their style of bodily ecstasy.

At 18, Blandine aged out of the foster system and attended an Independence Workshop. After this, she moved into an apartment with three 19-year-old boys, Jack , Todd , and Malik, who also came from foster homes. Unbeknownst to Blandine, two of the boys, average-yet-intuitive Jack and handsome, arrogant Malik are obsessed with her, while quiet Todd, an avid cartoonist, is obsessed with Malik. Malik and Jack’s lust for Blandine takes the form of a competition between them, and they channel this in a series of animal sacrifices in which they force Todd to participate.

Also living in the building is Joan, a fortysomething obituary writer who crosses Blandine’s path in the laundromat and stands out for her solitariness. Joan has attracted the attention and ire of Moses Blitz , the son of recently-deceased former TV star Elsie Blitz , who is in his fifties and is addicted to daubing himself in phosphorescent glowstick liquid. When Joan’s boss forces her to remove Moses’s diatribe against his mother from the obituary comments, Moses decides to leave Los Angeles for Vacca Vale to seek Joan out. When he arrives, he confesses to a priest all the abuses his mother committed against him.

As the nears the time when Blandine exits her body, a few significant events take place. While Blandine accompanies Jack to his dog-walking job to plan an act of sabotage against Maxwell Pinky , one of the authors of the Vacca Vale redevelopment project, she finds she has chemistry with Jack, whom she only ever thought of as her roommate. Although Jack is attracted to Blandine, he intuits that she is using him and arrives home riled up and ready to perform another animal sacrifice. Meanwhile, Blandine is walking in Chastity Valley when she comes across Moses and a goat, whom she calls Hildegard after her favorite mystic. The goat is injured, so Blandine takes her out of the Valley to enlist help.

On the outskirts, she sees James Yager, and he insists on helping her and accompanying her home. She takes the goat home and gives her some food. While James is remorseful that he took advantage of his position in seducing Blandine, she is furious with him and tells him to never come near her again. Meanwhile, her male roommates find the goat, and Jack and Malik try to force Todd to sacrifice her against his will. Blandine tries to save Hildegard, but Jack rips off her clothes, and Todd ends up knifing her in the stomach. Moses intervenes, and Blandine witnesses his phosphorescent glow while she has her out-of-body experience.

A few days later, Joan is taking care of Blandine in the Intensive Care Unit. Joan heard Blandine’s screams but felt unable to intervene and has taken the time off work to visit her. Although Joan cannot express everything she feels, Blandine appreciates the gesture of solidarity and feels optimistic. Meanwhile, the three male roommates have been arrested.

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National Book Foundation > Books > The Rabbit Hutch

The Rabbit Hutch

Winner, national book awards 2022 for fiction.

Tess Gunty earned an MFA in creative writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Joyland, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, Flash , and elsewhere. She was raised in South Bend, Indiana, and lives in Los Angeles. More about this author >

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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.

Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch.

Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives.

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.

Judges Citation

A bold and prismatic debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty is about the daily lives of the residents in a depressed Midwestern complex. Told over the course of one hot summer week and through a kaleidoscope of voices, The Rabbit Hutch is beautiful, biting, darkly comic, and provocative. This novel is a snapshot of America and the many ways we struggle with loneliness, yearning, and the painful pursuit of freedom.

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

• Print length 400 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date August 2, 2022
• File size 16194 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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From the Publisher

Editorial reviews, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09KXGQ5MP
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (August 2, 2022)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 2, 2022
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 16194 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ B0CFT9MNV5
• #135 in Psychological Literary Fiction
• #637 in Coming of Age Fiction (Kindle Store)
• #851 in Psychological Fiction (Kindle Store)

About the author

Tess Gunty holds an MFA in creative writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon fellow. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Iowa Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Freeman’s, Joyland, and other publications. The Rabbit Hutch is her first novel.

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