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

Written by Tess Gunty

Narrated by Tess Gunty, Scott Brick, Suzanne Toren and 2 more

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • The standout literary debut that everyone is talking about • "Inventive, heartbreaking and acutely funny."—The Guardian

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, TIME, NPR, Oprah Daily, People

Blandine isn't like the other residents of her building.

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.

"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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9780593627983

Tess Gunty

Tess Gunty was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana. She received a B.A. in English with an Honors Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame, where she won the Ernest Sandeen Award for her poetry collection. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow, and her work was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, The Iowa Review, Freeman’s, and other publications, and she lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews for The Rabbit Hutch

[bookwyrmm_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hard-to-describe but very interesting story about a variety of interconnected characters that will appeal to fans of Jennifer Egan.

[jscape2000 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Characters unable to connect to each other shed identities, roles, names. A brilliant unapproachable girl stands at the center of a vortex of attention. An entire constellation of disaffected townspeople, men who want to sleep with her, women who pity or fear her, all who seem to admire her, and all come into focus when they see themselves in her.

[doondeck · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some very we'll written parts but this story was confusing and hard to follow.

[alexrichman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Brilliantly DFW-esque in its bizarre diversions; never quite as good when it returns to the straight and narrow. Will definitely snap up her next one.

[novelcommentary · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.”
The Rabbit Hutch
This was an excellent read. Tess Gurdy, at 30 won the National Book Award for this novel of vignettes depicting the lives of those living in a rundown apartment building --and yes it's called The Rabbit Hutch--in a run down Indiana town. The book is peppered with sentences that insist on being highlighted. And I did. In C4 is a brilliant 18 year old who according to the first line is exiting her body. Below her in C2 is a 40 year old who hears her screams, as does the 70 year old man above her as he shuffles down the stairs to leave a note and a dead mouse on another neighbor's door. There's a new mother in C10 who is afraid to tell her husband that she is afraid of her child's eyes; she won't look at them. The one outsider is a man named Moses who likes to spread glow stick gel over his body and scare his enemies in the middle of the night.
Gurdy grew up in Indiana and uses the backdrop of Vacca Vale as a model for South Bend, a town that also suffered from the closing of a once famous auto industry, the Studebaker. "the Rabbit Hutch itself, the apartment block where Blandine lives, 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. "(The Guardian)
The character sketches are brilliant and the evolving plot makes for a compulsive read. I always love the interconnectedness of multiple characters coming together, ( i.e.Egan's Goon Squad, Orange's There,There, and McCann's Let the Great World Spin). Gurdy manages to do that as well. Highly recommend and look forward to her future work.

Lines:

Kara had a taste for neon clothing, cinnamon gum, and anguished men.

New mother: "Her breasts are swollen to celebrity
size, there are bolts of electricity zapping the powerlines of her brain, and without any assistance from coffee, her body has awakened itself to the pitch of animal vigilance. The hormones have turned the volume of the world all the way up, angling her ears babyward, forcing her to listen—always listen—for his new and spitty voice. She feels like a fox. Like a fox on Adderall"

The woman’s hair is the color of mouse fur, her bangs are cut short, and
she is wearing woolly knitted clothes despite the heat. Forty-something. 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.”

With his smile, and those jeans, it’s evident to Blandine that
no one has ever truly criticized this young man to his face, and that he’s a product of extreme parental love.

Shortly after the exchange, another man arrives, bell chinking behind him. Bound in a dark leather jacket, the odor of cigarettes, and a fresh tan, his presence exerts its own gravity. He’d be well suited for a men’s deodorant commercial, Blandine thinks: handsome enough to serve as a vessel for positive self-projection, but not so handsome as to threaten the consumer’s personal sense of masculinity. Blandine senses that he has many tattoos, although she can’t see them. He wears his testosterone like a strong cologne

Her fellow students live in the suburbs
and spend their lunches complaining about the cruises that their mothers foist upon them. They exchange How My Parents Surprised Me with My First Brand-New Car stories and wear coats from luxury outdoor brands, as though driving to high school is an extreme sport

Speaking of scandals, did you hear that Kayla gave three lacrosse guys pterodactyl? Oh my God, you haven’t heard of this? It’s three guys, one girl. The guys stand side by side, in a row. She blows the guy in the middle, then gives the other two hand jobs. So it looks like she’s trying to fly.

It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in
common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved.

Throughout the visit, his sister arranged her clothes, voice, and posture to communicate superiority, so proud of herself for leaving their town, as though it were a maximum-security prison. As though it took more than a plane ticket, a cosmetology degree, and a dainty face for her to find another life.

[charon07 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am sick and tired of books about young women having affairs with older and/or married men and coming to regret it. I think I’m officially too old for books like Luster and Rabbit Hutch. Rabbit Hutch is also marred by just plain weird and inexplicably motivated characters and some of the most implausible dialog I’ve ever heard. The scene where Blandine confronts her former lover in the car and critiques their relationship in terms of capitalism had me rolling my eyes. Descriptions of Blandine’s internal organs as her city of Vacca Vale left me scratching my head. I’m clearly not the millennial post-capitalist target audience for this book.

[srms.reads · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5⭐

Set in the fictional Midwestern town of Vacca Vale, Indiana, The Rabbit Hutch revolves around the residents of a run-down apartment building, once ambitiously bestowed the French name, La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex, by the philanthropist who funded its development. But now after the Zorn Automobile factories are long gone, the city is one of boarded storefronts and abandoned buildings- one of the many “dying cities” in America, the apartment building is more commonly referred to by its English translation “The Rabbit Hutch”.

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.

Other residents of the building include a new mother who is having difficulty adjusting to her new role and finds comfort in watching reruns of an old sitcom, an elderly couple who carry on with their regular squabbles, television and cigarettes, an aspiring influencer, a man who spends time on dating sites frequently checking on the ratings he has been given by women he has met and a woman who works for an online obituary portal and is the target of the wrath of a fifty-three-year-old man whose negative comments on his celebrity mother’s obituary were deleted by her, following company norms. We move back and forth between past and present, exploring the backstories of some of the characters, while others play a blink-and-miss role in the bigger picture.

While I was enthralled by parts of the novel, I found the digressions a bit distracting and inconsequential for the most part and the uneven treatment of the characters ( in terms of how well fleshed out the secondary characters are ) was a tad disappointing. While I admired the depth in the writing in certain parts of the novel, I felt that a few critical themes were explored superficially. More importantly, though I did feel sympathy for Blandine, I found it hard to connect with the overarching narrative or with the characters. This is an intriguing novel - one that is hard to describe in a review and that needs to be read with time and patience. The author touches upon many important themes – vulnerability, loneliness, mental health, community, family and faith among others. The dark and depressing tones in this novel are balanced by moments of wisdom and humor. The illustrations featured in this novel (done by the author’s brother, Nicholas Gunty) are worth special mention as they complement the text very well. Overall, I believe that Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is an ambitious debut that many will find more appealing than I did. Tess Gunty is a talented writer. I look forward to more from this author in the future.

[muddyboy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A really creative complex novel rightly rewarded many prizes for how good it was. The story has a plethora of unique characters but primarily centers on a teenaged orphan girl who changes her name to Blandine and her theater teacher. The rabbit hutch refers to the large apartment building and the tenants who live there. The novel has a philosophical bent and there is artwork in it as well. The book is hard to describe but well worth reading. I loved it,

[markm2315 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I don't know if despair is merely the tone of this novel, its setting, or if that is what the novel is about. Some characters have a brief flash of ecstasy, but it's brief and maybe they don't. There is plenty of cruelty. Wise men say that there is a very narrow space between comedy and tragedy and it must be hard to write in that space, but the author sometimes seems to camp in it. She uses the comedic technique of the unexpected element in a series with great success. I found all of this unusually satisfying and her characters are unusually memorable. Another reviewer recommended Blandine T-shirts, and he might be right.

[lindaloretz · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Rabbit Hutch is a modern American story about people who have curious characteristics and have been affected by the horrors of 21st-century life. Its setting is the fictional town of Vacca Vale, Indiana which used to be a thriving car manufacturing town. But, unfortunately, its heyday is over, and widespread poverty and social disintegration prevail. A developer has proposed a rejuvenation plan, but he and his team experience a disturbing interruption to a planning meeting.

Numerous characters play a part in the book, and many live in the Rabbit Hutch, affordable housing where the units have little privacy and mimic the blurred boundaries of modern life. Folks know almost everything about their neighbors in adjacent units, and distasteful events occur regularly.

We know from the novel's beginning that Blandine Watkins, one of the main characters, an eighteen-year-old malcontent, will exit her body. The reader becomes painfully aware that Blandine IS everything that has wounded her during her childhood in foster care and much angst about religion and the meaning of life. Blandine lives with three male roommates, all aged out of the foster care system. Each carries baggage from the system.

It's challenging to keep track of the characters. Many are angry and act in unconventional ways to communicate with others. Some of the stories tie to others; others do not. Contemporary concepts and themes run through the course of the book, and rather than trying to tie them together; I offer this list of concepts typical of post-industrial, modern life:

Disposable people
American icons
Abandonment
Decaying towns
Flooding and flooded housing areas
Marxism
Capitalism
Abuse of power
Sexual abuse
Complex villains
Fakeness
Revitalization
Gentrification
Emojis—vulgar and others
Anonymous lives
Social justice
discrimination
Suicide
Opioid abuse
Religion
Fatal flaws
Commodifying people
Mysticism
Truth
Internet
Healing
Trauma
afterlife
Love
Terror
Unwanted babies
Motherhood
Mothers not bonding with babies
American class system
Male dominance
Power structures
Animal sacrifices
Animal abuse
Cancer
Angst
Phobias

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Creative, yet still readable. Humorous, yet very serious. Challenging in some ways.

[dele2451 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Original. If you gravitate towards tales of humanity's "quiet desperation" then this is one for you. I loved the illustrations and how they were put to use in the narrative.

[dinahmine · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The Rabbit Hutch was so not for me. I don’t have any interest in reading about awful people being awful, and I couldn’t find any redeeming characteristics in the novel. I DNF’d at p131.

[browner56 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In The Rabbit Hutch, we meet Tiffany Watkins, a preternaturally smart and intuitive teenage girl living in Vacca Vale, a decaying industrial town in present-day northwest Indiana. She appears to have a lot going for her—including a coveted scholarship to the only private school in town—but, as the product of a broken home and several stops in the foster care system, she is lonely and isolated. When an illicit relationship with the one person who seems to understand goes awry, Tiffany is so distraught that she quits school, takes a menial job, changes her name to Blandine after a martyred second-century French saint, and moves into a squalid apartment complex with Jack, Malik, and Todd, three other young people also longing to escape their foster lives.

The apartment building, named La Lapinière back in its elegant heyday but now dubbed “The Rabbit Hutch” for its rundown status, houses an eclectic assortment of troubled people who share their bad luck or their bad life decisions. As we are introduced the residents—including a young mother afraid to look into her newborn’s eyes, a middle-aged woman whose life involves editing online obituaries, and an older couple unhappily married for many years—it becomes clear that loneliness is another thing they have in common. The action in the book involves two threads: Moses, the estranged son of a recently deceased actress, is offended by edits to his comments on his mother’s obituary and seeks revenge; and the three roommates fall in love with Blandine and try to impress her with the ritualistic killing of small animals. While these storylines do come together in the end, it is not giving away much to say that things do not end well.

I am really torn as to how to evaluate this novel. Overall, I did enjoy reading it, mostly because of the often-exquisite phrasing and language that first-time author Tess Gunty uses in telling the tale. Simply put, this is a beautifully written story that takes the reader between past and present events and from third-person to first-person narration in such a seamless manner that everything makes sense. Although the backstories of several of the supporting characters—most notably the roommates, unfortunately—are underdeveloped, we do get to understand very well what drives Blandine. On the other hand, not every detail in the tale makes total sense (Blandine’s whole Marxist relationship rant near the end, for instance) and the book does drag along to what becomes a very terse conclusion. So, although The Rabbit Hutch is an easy novel to recommend for the writing alone, it is a recommendation that comes with some qualifications.

[booklove2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Winner of the 2022 National Book Award, this sort of surprised me that it won, even before I read it.   I thought it might be a bit low-key for an award winner.  The book follows the residents of an apartment complex in an industrial wasteland in Indiana.  The main character, Blandine, is a bit of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl to the other former foster teen boys she lives with and the conflict is set up on the first page.  I wish the other characters had seen more of Blandine.  Even the boys she lived with often misconstrued Blandine.  Personally, I really liked many of the other characters in the town of Vacca Vale and the Rabbit Hutch apartment complex that are sometimes only briefly mentioned.  I wouldn't have minded spending more time with the other characters for more of a community book that was less focused on Blandine (my personal fave is Penny with her shopping cart of Beanie Babies "like a sidekick"!)  So many great characters, I would say most of them.  All of them are somewhat isolated and learning how to live in a town abandoned by Zorn Automobiles, that also wants to destroy and build on the gorgeous greenery that Blandine loves and feels safe in.  I like when a book is filled with so many odd, memorable details, but in this case I wish those details would have tied together better.  I'm ASSUMING that some of these topics are very close to home for Tess Gunty, so maybe a bit more distance in time, letting the book simmer, would have allowed the book to be more cohesive in the long run.   I did really like this book, but without some polishing, I don't think it would stand on my personal Great Books shelf.  It's hard for me to see why this book might be GREAT but I think at this point, the problem might be that I'm very book spoiled, so 'The Rabbit Hutch' might remind me of books that I liked a bit better:   'Special Topics in Calamity Physics' by Marisha Pessl,  'Skippy Dies' by Paul Murray, 'Stephen Florida' by Gabe Habash (for the character of Moses), a foster kid version of 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt, and the reserved community of 'There There' by Tommy Orange and 'Deacon King Kong' by James McBride. 

*Book #134/322 I have read of the shortlisted Morning News Tournament of Books

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

...he tries to compute why he finds one person's distance alluring while he finds his wife's distance funereal. The faucet pummels water in the tub; he listens to his wife pull the metal valve and wonders how much water is lost as it is rerouted between the faucet and the showered. James never lost interest in his wife, even after the color drained from her hair and her laugh, but she lost interest in him...

Tess Gunty's debut novel is certainly the literary book-of-the-moment, winning the National Book Award and laudatory reviews everywhere. Set largely in a decaying low-income apartment building in the fictional Indiana city of Vacca Vale, the novel follows a few residents and others, but focuses on Blandine, a teenager who shares an apartment with three boys, all of whom are, like her, graduates from the foster system. Blandine is brilliant and oddly charismatic and beautiful in an off-beat way. She loves mystics, especially medieval women, and likes to rant in what sounds like lengthy twitter threads. Everyone is drawn to her, from her high school drama teacher to the three boys who live in the same apartment, to a middle-aged woman who speaks to her once. Gunty has a writing style that sometimes feels over-written and witty for the sake of being witty, but which flows nicely and she does have an eye for the interesting detail.

I struggled with this novel, I really did. I loved the sections that weren't about or told from the perspective of Blandine, which is to say, there were a handful of chapters I enjoyed. But Blandine is the focus of the novel and of the people in this novel. She's beautiful and brilliant, and quirky and unique, and everyone thinks about her all the time. I like novels with unlikeable protagonists and I like books with likable main characters, but here is an unlikeable character whom everyone genuflects to and thinks about all the time. Random people notice how beautiful she is as she passes them on the street. I was bored with her and a little baffled that being told over and over that this character is fascinating is enough for many readers to decide that yes, she is. Anyway, greater minds than mine loved this book.

[brianinbuffalo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Gunty's debut novel validates my belief that there is a fine line between delightfully inventive and frustratingly bizarre. For the most part, I enjoyed the book's twists and turns. My problem with "The Rabbit Hutch" was twofold. Gunty touched on one issue in a podcast interview when she conceded that there are "so many characters." As I've said in reviews of some previous works of fiction, this book would have been more satisfying for me if the author had winnowed down the character roster and focused on masterfully developing four or five key players. Some of the characters didn't seem to have meaningful roles in the narrative. Also, as a reader who almost always prefers a more "linear" storyline, finishing the book was a tough slog. Still, Gunty hits on many important and intriguing themes, including human fragility, loneliness and addiction. I look forward to following her literary career.

[aadyer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An impressive debut which reveals the depth and breadth of the authors knowledge and interests. There are a collection of interesting and esoteric characters in this comedy of errors and interlinked series of stories. In some ways this is a collection of short stories that being all links have turned into a novel and it’s all the richer for it.

This has multi level depth and is entertaining. There are of course problems with it including the freakishness and partial urban fantasy elements to it but it’s still a very good debut novel.

[rmarcin-630843 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is about the inhabitants of an apartment building and their lives. It takes place over a week in real time, but also has accounts of things that happened before.
I thought it was interesting in the way the book was written, in the intertwined stories, and the strange look at life. However, it wasn't really my favorite book. I did admire the author's style, but I also thought it a bit of a strange story.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is my 5th read from the 2022 NBA Fiction Longlist, and perhaps the one I feel most deserving of being there. Maybe not the one I enjoyed the most, but this is a fascinating story and I think I don't fully understand parts--especially everything involving Hildegard and a possible religious themed tie to Blandine? I don't even know.

This book is a little crazy, with many different threads running together. Vacca Vale, Indiana, a depressed former industrial town (former home of Zorn Automobiles). The Rabbit Hutch is the nickname given an old affordable apartment building called that, but in French. Blandine lives there with 3 other aged-out foster children. We meet the various neighbors living below and above her. They are all struggling in some way--as new parents, with work, getting old, etc.

Blandine is a high school drop out, former scholarship student, who was encouraged to get a scholarship to college. Instead she quit school, has no friends, is obsessed with Hildegard, and works some shifts at a restaurant. She loves nature and animals.

Meanwhile, Moses is the 40-something son of a recently deceased child star who was from Vacca Vale. He holds grudges, hated his mother, and has Morgellons. He has returned to Vacca Vale with a plan for revenge.

Yes, somehow this comes together. It's not necessarily pretty, but it is very much interesting.