NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORKER ESSENTIAL READ • A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, TIME, NPR, Oprah Daily, Literary Hub, Kirkus • A People Top 10 Book of The Year • A Bookpage Top 10 Book of the Year
“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
“The most promising first novel I’ve read this year . . . A feeling of genuine crisis . . . propels the narrative through its many twists to the catharsis of its bizarre ending.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“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 Yorker
“Transcendent . . . Compelling and startlingly beautiful . . . Gunty weaves these stories together with skill and subtlety.”—Clea Simon, The Boston Globe
“Riveting . . . 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.”—Sarah Ditum, The Guardian
“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
“A powerful and brutal book, brimming with dark and funny lines . . . Gunty’s true subject, though, is a land of loneliness, squandered potential and exploitation that feels uniquely American — and also the human interconnections and strokes of luck that can help us survive it.”—Dorany Pineda, Los Angeles Times
“This seriously impressive debut novel — about the inhabitants of a low-rent apartment block in small-town Indiana — thrillingly blends the vivid realism and comic experimentalism so beloved of American fiction. The writing is incandescent, the range of styles and voices remarkable. . . . There’s so much dazzling stuff here, it can be hard to know where to look. . . . What lingers is something simple: the sparkling interiority of its characters.”—Robert Collins, The Sunday Times (London)
“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
“The Rabbit Hutch aches, bleeds, and even scars but it also forgives with laughter, with insight, and finally, through an act of generational independence that remains this novel’s greatest accomplishment, with an act of rescue, rescue of narrative, rescue from ritual, rescue of heart, the rescue of tomorrow.”—Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves
“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
“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)
“Darkly funny, surprising, and mesmerizing . . . A stunning and original debut that is as smart as it is entertaining . . . Gunty pans swiftly from room to room, perspective to perspective, molding a story that . . . 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. . . . A striking and wise depiction of what it means to be awake and alive in a dying building, city, nation, and world.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ 07/04/2022
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. The main character is 18-year-old Blandine Watkins, who grew up in foster care and dropped out of high school in junior year. In the opening scene, she is stabbed in her apartment by an unidentified assailant. Gradually, the causes of the crime emerge, followed eventually by the facts, as well as her fate. Along the way, Gunty delves into the stories of Blandine’s neighbors, brilliantly and achingly charting the range of their experiences. An erotic flashback of an infant’s conception at a motel on higher ground in Vacca Vale called the Wooden Lady (“It’s like if manslaughter were a place,” one reviewer describes it), where married couple Hope and Anthony hole up during a “1,000-year flood,” contrasts with a devastatingly banal and ultimately traumatic sexual encounter between Blandine and her drama teacher the year before. There’s also a lonely woman who lives in a state of “flammable peace” due to her sensitivity to noise, with whom Blandine shares her fascination with Catholic mystics before going off to sabotage a celebration involving the city’s gentrification scheme with voodoo dolls and fake blood. It all ties together, achieving this first novelist’s maximalist ambitions and making powerful use of language along the way. Readers will be breathless. (Aug.)
★ 07/22/2022
DEBUT Gunty's first novel is a weirdly absorbing read that captures the heart and soul of a Rust Belt town. In this case, the town is Vacca Vale, IN, presumably a fictionalized South Bend, IN, with Gunty probing the history of a dying place that closely resembles her hometown. Gunty homes in on an odd assortment of individuals living in a rundown apartment complex derisively dubbed The Rabbit Hutch. Principal among them is Blandine. A young high school dropout, just out of foster care and fascinated by Hildegard of Bingen, Blandine has been recovering from a relationship with her drama teacher when she comes to live with three young men. These four young people are all awakening to their potential, even if that may lead to destruction and violence. The story's mystery and beauty are driven by Blandine's narrative—and the brutal stabbing at the novel's commencement—but Gunty also deftly weaves in the stories of the other residents. Each character is plagued by loneliness, secrets, and unfulfilled aspirations that the novel reveals through masterly prose and imaginative depictions. VERDICT A woefully beautiful tale of a community striving for rebirth and redemption; highly recommended.—Faye A. Chadwell
Author Tess Gunty and four acclaimed narrators present this unique debut novel set in the La Lapiniere Affordable Housing complex, which is generally called "The Rabbit Hutch." Narrator Suzanne Toren captures the personality of the young resident Blondine, who is obsessed with the writings of female Christian mystics. Scott Brick sounds gentle yet sinister as he portrays the teenage tenants who have just placed out of the foster care system in the chapter called "A Game of Clue." Also worth recognizing are the chapters presented by Kirby Heyborne and Kyla Garcia. All the characters in this striking novel are dysfunctional, yet listeners will care deeply about their fates as they live crammed together in this crumbling apartment building in an Indiana factory town long past its heyday. D.L.G. 2022 National Book Award Winner © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Author Tess Gunty and four acclaimed narrators present this unique debut novel set in the La Lapiniere Affordable Housing complex, which is generally called "The Rabbit Hutch." Narrator Suzanne Toren captures the personality of the young resident Blondine, who is obsessed with the writings of female Christian mystics. Scott Brick sounds gentle yet sinister as he portrays the teenage tenants who have just placed out of the foster care system in the chapter called "A Game of Clue." Also worth recognizing are the chapters presented by Kirby Heyborne and Kyla Garcia. All the characters in this striking novel are dysfunctional, yet listeners will care deeply about their fates as they live crammed together in this crumbling apartment building in an Indiana factory town long past its heyday. D.L.G. 2022 National Book Award Winner © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
★ 2022-05-25
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.
A stunning and original debut that is as smart as it is entertaining.
