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

By Tess Gunty

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: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9780593534670

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.

Book preview

Cover for The Rabbit Hutch

Praise for Tess Gunty’s

The Rabbit Hutch

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 New York Times Book Review

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

The most promising first novel I’ve read this year.

—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"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

As surreal as it is genius…. Spanning one week, the novel culminates in a shocking and violent climax that will stay with you long after you turn the last page.

—BuzzFeed

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.

—Los Angeles Times

An astonishing portrait…. 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)

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

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Seriously impressive…. 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.

—The Sunday Times (London)

"Original and incisive…. The Rabbit Hutch is breathtaking, compassionate and spectacular."

—The Irish Times

Remarkable…. Gunty is a wonderful writer, a master of the artful phrase.

—Booklist (starred review)

Tess Gunty

The Rabbit Hutch

Tess Gunty holds an MFA in creative writing from New York University, where she was a Lillian Vernon fellow. The Rabbit Hutch is her first novel.

tessgunty.com

Tess Gunty is available for select speaking engagements. To inquire about a possible appearance, please contact Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau at [e-mail] or visit prhspeakers.com.

Book Title, The Rabbit Hutch, Subtitle, A novel, Author, Tess Gunty, Imprint, Knopf

Copyright © 2022 by Tess Gunty

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2022.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

Names: Gunty, Tess, author.

Title: The rabbit hutch : a novel / Tess Gunty.

Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021054987 (print) | LCCN 2021054988 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Apartment dwellers—Fiction. | Middle West—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.

Classification: LCC PS3607.U54827 R33 2022 (print) | LCC PS3607.U54827 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021054987

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021054988

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780593467879

Ebook ISBN 9780593534670

Cover design: Keenan

Illustrations are © 2021 by Nicholas Gunty

vintagebooks.com

ep_prh_6.1_148355207_c0_r1

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Part I

The Opposite of Nothing

All Together, Now

Part II

Afterlife

A Threat to Us All

Where Life Lives On

An Absolutely True Story

Hear Me Out

R.I.P. Tho

Intonation

Big

Please Just

My First Was a Fish

Chemical Hazard

Variables

Part III

It Wasn’t Todd’s Idea

Namesake

Pearl

The Rotten Truth

A List of Hildegard Quotes, Written in a Notebook on Blandine’s Nightstand, Which Jack Reads on Wednesday Morning, Tracing the Word Nothing on His Skin with a Fingernail

Purebreds

The Flood

Olive Brine

Game of Clue

Mostly Rabbits

The Expanding Circle

Respect the Deceased

Just Bored

Welcome Home

Your Auntie Tammy

Human Being!

Major American Fires

I Leave It Up to You

Sold!

Part IV

Altogether Now

Electrical Malfunction

Viral

According to Todd

The Facts

Solve for Y in Terms of X

Tada

What Hildegard Said

Part V

What Is Your Relation?

Acknowledgments

Notes

_148355207_

If you don’t sell them as pets, you got to get rid of them as meat. Them guys are all meat. But see, they start doing this to each other.

Woman points to rabbits.

What’s that?

Peeing on each other and stuff like that, when they get older. If you don’t have ten separate cages for them, then they start fighting. Then the males castrate the other males. They do. They chew their balls right off. Then you have a bloody mess. That’s why you got to butcher them when they get a certain age, or you have a heck of a mess.

—Rhonda Britton, Flint, Michigan, resident, 1989

Invisible and eternal things are made known through visible and temporal things.

—Hildegard von Bingen, Benedictine abbess, 1151

part I

The Opposite of Nothing

On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only eighteen years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen. The agony is sweet, as the mystics promised. It’s like your soul is being stabbed with light, the mystics said, and they were right about that, too. 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 fifties, glowing like a firefly. He runs to her and yells.

Knife, cotton, hoof, bleach, pain, fur, bliss—as Blandine exits herself, she is all of it. She is every tenant of her apartment building. She is trash and cherub, a rubber shoe on the seafloor, her father’s orange jumpsuit, a brush raking through her mother’s hair. The first and last Zorn Automobile factory in Vacca Vale, Indiana. A nucleus inside the man who robbed her body when she was fourteen, a pair of red glasses on the face of her favorite librarian, a radish tugged from a bed of dirt. She is no one. She is Katy the Portuguese water dog, who licked her face whenever the foster family banished them both in the snow because they were in the way. An algorithm for amplified content and a blue slushee from the gas station. The first pair of tap shoes on the feet of a child actress and the man telling her to try harder. She is the smartphone that films her as she bleeds on the floorboards of her apartment, and she is the chipped nail polish on the teenager who assembled the ninetieth step of that phone on a green factory floor in Shenzhen, China. An American satellite, a bad word, the ring on the finger of her high school theater director. She is every cottontail rabbit grazing on the vegetation of her supposedly dying city. Ten minutes of pleasure igniting between the people who made her, the final tablet of oxycodone on her mother’s tongue, the gavel that will sentence the boys to prison for what they’re doing to Blandine right now. There is no such thing as right now. She is not another young woman wounded on the floor, body slashed by men for its resources—no. She is paying attention. She is the last laugh.

On that hot night in Apartment C4, when Blandine Watkins exits her body, she is not everything. Not exactly. She’s just the opposite of nothing.

All Together, Now

C12: On Wednesday night, in the nine o’clock hour, the man who lives four floors above the crime is staring into an app called: Rate Your Date (Mature Users!). The app glows a deep red, and he is certain that there is no one inside it. Like many men who have weathered female rejection, the man in Apartment C12 believes that women have more power than anyone else on the planet. When evidence suggests that this can’t be true, he gets angry. It is an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument. The man—now in his sixties—lies on his sheets in the dark. He is done with the day, but the day is not done with itself; it is still too early to sleep. He is a logger, past his professional expiration date but lacking both the financial and psychological savings to retire. Often, he feels the weight of phantom lumber on his back like a child. Often, he feels the weight of a phantom child on his back like lumber. Since his wife died six years ago, the apartment has seemed empty of furniture, but it is, in fact, congested with furniture. Sweating, the man cradles his large, bright screen in his hands.

nice enuf, like a dad, but fatter then his prof pic. his eye contact = wrong. doesnt ask about u and seems obsessed w/ the prices. velcro wallet, user MelBell23 had commented on his profile two weeks ago. smells like gary indiana. ★★☆☆☆

The only other comment on his profile was posted six months ago, by DeniseDaBeast: this man is a tator tot. ★☆☆☆☆

Noise rumbles from an apartment below. A party, he assumes.

---

—

C10: The teenager adjusts his bedroom light to flattering bulbs of halo. He runs a hand through his hair, applies a lip balm. Smears a magazine sample of cologne on his chest, although he knows the gesture is absurd. Angles the camera so that it catches his best shapes and shadows. His mother is working the night shift, but he locks his door anyway. Does thirty jumping jacks, thirty push-ups. Texts: Ready.

---

—

C8: The mother carries her baby to the couch and pulls up her tank top. He’s not supposed to be awake this late at night, but rules mean nothing to babies. While he nurses, he demands to bond, and the mother tries. Tries again. Tries harder. But she can’t do it. He fires shrewd, telepathic, adult accusation upon her skin. She can feel it. He sucks hard and scratches her with nails too tender to clip, long and sharp enough to cut her. With her free hand, she checks her phone. A text from the mother’s mother: a photo of Daisy the bearded dragon, wearing a miniature biker costume. Cushioned helmet strapped to her spiky coral head, black pleather jacket strapped to her belly. In a Hells Angels font, the back of the jacket reads: dragon disaster. The reptile peers at the camera from her perch on the dining table, her expression unreadable. The mother zooms in on Daisy’s dinosaur eye, which seems to observe her from another epoch, 90 million years in the past.

U got ur baby, I got mine!! wrote the mother’s mother, who now lives in Pensacola with her second husband. HA HA HA! Roy found the costume……. 🚲 🔥 ☠ isnt she a RIOT??? 🐉 🐊 🐲 God bless u and my sweet Grandbaby 😇 💓 🙏

Agitated, the young mother swipes out of the text thread and drifts between three social media platforms, feeling the weight and warmth of her baby beneath her right arm, cherishing his tiny sounds of contentment as he nurses. As usual, predators are wreaking havoc on the internet. Predators are the only people in town. If she had to summarize the plot of contemporary life, the mother would say: it’s about everyone punishing each other for things they didn’t do. And here she is, refusing to look at her baby, punishing him for something he didn’t do.

The mother has developed a phobia of her baby’s eyes.

He is four weeks old. For four weeks, she’s been living in the cellar of her mind. All day, she has been feeding her anxiety with Mommy Blogs. They are dreadful, the Mommy Blogs, worse than the medical websites, but likewise designed to exploit your Thanatos. Mothering is the most valuable work you will ever do, the Mommy Blogs declare with rainproof conviction. Before clicking on them, the mother prepared herself for what she previously believed to be the worst possible diagnosis: You are a bad mother. But that was not, in fact, the worst possible diagnosis. You are a psychopath, the Mommy Blogs concluded. You are a threat to us all.

On her sofa, cradling her baby, the mother begins to panic, so she self-soothes. Deep breath in, exhale the tension. Let the forehead, eyebrows, and mouth go slack. Hear nothing but the whirr of the ceiling fan. She’s supposed to imagine her body as a jellyfish, or something. Visualize the boundaries between her body and the rest of the world dissolving. Her cousin Kara taught her these tricks, back when they were roommates.

Before she was a mother, the mother was Hope. It’s funny that your name is Hope, Kara once said. Because you’re, like, so bad at it. After high school, Hope got a job as a waitress, Kara as a hairdresser. Together, they rented a cheap house near the river. Kara had a taste for neon clothing, cinnamon gum, and anguished men. Her hair color changed every few months, but she favored purple. She was a bafflingly happy person, often belting Celine Dion and dancing as she cooked. Frequently, Hope wondered what it would be like to vacation in her cousin’s psychology. When they were twenty, Kara found Hope in the fetal position on the bathroom tile at three in the morning, sobbing about how frightened she was, frightened of everything, an everything so big it was essentially nothing, and the nothing swallowed her, swallowed everything. The next day, Kara drove Hope to the Vegetable Bed, the only health food store in Vacca Vale—a small cube of flickering light that beguiled them both with its perfume of spices and variety of sugar substitutes. They returned with a paper bag of homeopathic remedies that Hope could neither understand nor afford: aconite, argentum nitricum, stramonium, arsenicum album, ignatia. Whenever Hope would nose-dive into one of her electrocuting shadows, Kara dispensed a palmful of remedies, brewed lavender tea, subscribed walks. Meditation. Yoga. Magnesium. Often, she’d put on an episode of Hope’s favorite television show, Meet the Neighbors. Wear this necklace around your neck, Kara would say. It’s amethyst—the tranquilizing crystal, great for fear. Dispels negativity. Here, do this breathing exercise with me. As Kara often informed men at bars, she was a Myers-Briggs INFP (the mediator), an Enneagram Type 2 (the giver), an astrological Virgo (the healer). It was her vocation, she believed, to nurture.

Now, in her apartment, Hope can still hear Kara guiding her through a breathing exercise, her lilac voice hovering in the room. Deep breath in. Exhale. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Again. As she breathes, Hope can feel her baby against her skin, warm and soft.

Her fear is not so mysterious, she reasons. Her husband has been gone at the construction site all day, and there is no sleep in her recent history, just a lump of an oncoming cold in her throat. 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.

Not to mention the greater body-terrors. After the birth, it stopped being a pussy and went back to being a vagina. She is discovering that pregnancy, birth, and postpartum recovery comprise three acts of a horror film no one lets you watch before you live it. In Catholic school, they made Hope and her peers watch videos of abortions, made them listen to women weep afterward, made them watch the fetus in the womb flinch away from the doctor’s tool. But did anyone ever tell them what would happen when you pushed the fetus out of your body and into the world? No. It was beautiful. It was natural. Above all, it was a miracle. Motherhood shrouded in a sacred blue veil, macabre details concealed from you, an elaborate conspiracy to trick Catholics into making more Catholics.

Afterpains strike the mother’s body like bolts of goddish lightning when she nurses. Nursing is not intuitive, and pumping makes her feel like a cyborg cow. Whenever she sneezes, she pees. To address this, she’s supposed to do Kegels, an exercise from Hell. The internet instructs her to imagine she is sitting on a marble. Then tighten your pelvic muscles as though you’re lifting the marble. Quite frankly, the mother said to her husband the other night, after reading the instructions out loud, what in the fuck? She describes her physical states to her husband compulsively, in detail, as though she is a dummy and a ventriloquist is making her do it. If he doesn’t share the cost, she will force him to imagine it.

But she doesn’t need to force him. When she starts to speak of the toll the birth has taken, he holds her hands, her gaze, her pain. I wish I could take it, he says. I wish I could take it all from you and put it into myself. Then he kisses her neck, gently defibrillating her back to life. He wants this, he tells her. He wants the gore; he wants four in the morning; he wants the beginning and the middle and the end; he wants to fix whatever he can fix and be there through the rest; he wants the bad and the good; he wants the sickness and the health. I want you, he says. Every you. He calls her a goddess. A hero. A miracle.

No, the mother thinks. No, she is not losing it. And, yes, it is normal to feel abnormal, after a body has left your body. Despite the absence of her particular condition online, the mother reasons, it is not so freakish to mortally fear your own baby’s eyes, when so much weather is raging inside you, and Twitter is cawing the news. Gunfire, murder, oil spill, terrorism, wildfire, abduction, bombing, floods. Funny video in which a woman opens her car to find a brown bear sitting in the driver’s seat snacking on her groceries. Murder, murder, war. The internet is upset. To experience reality as a handful of tap water, at a time like this, is to find oneself in good company. The baby blues—could they be like this? Neon and shrieking?

What is it about her baby’s eyes? They are too round. Permanently shocked. The baby catalogues each image with an expression of outrage, inspecting the world as though he might sue it. He doesn’t blink enough. She tries to engage him—jangling her keys, refracting light in an old jam jar, dancing her fingers—but visual stimulation overwhelms him, and whenever she tries something like this, he gets upset. The baby prefers to behold plain and unthreatening surfaces, like the walls. And they are arresting, his eyes, almost black, always liquid, often frantic. A feature inherited from his father’s family—a handsome tribe, each cousin moody and gorgeous and good at puzzles. The mother loves this pair of eyes, this pair her body formed like valuable carbon minerals under pressure. She loves his eyes as much as she loves his microtoenails, his fuzz of black hair, the scent of his head, the rash that resembles a barcode on his chubby, lolling neck. She loves her baby in colors she’s never seen before, just as the Mommy Blogs warned that she would. But love does not preclude terror—at twenty-five, the mother knows that the latter almost always accompanies the former. His eyes terrify her.

The mother tries to determine what the eyes evoke. A security camera. A panther’s gaze in the dark. A stalker in the bathroom. The eyes of the man who repeatedly thwacked the driver’s side window of that old van, years back, while she idled at the drive-through, dreaming of fries and sweet tea.

The man had used a child’s shovel to hit her window. Yellow plastic. He did not blink. There was no language in his throat, just ripping growls, his motivation unclear. A man who had lost it—and that was the right phrase, it contained the right holes. At the drive-through, the man’s eyes were dark, scared, and open. Lost it.

She had cranked down her window and offered to order him something, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

Look at me, he said over and over. Look at me.

She rolled up her window, wishing it were automatic so that this gesture of disregard wasn’t quite as violent, afraid of him but also, suddenly, bound to him. The coincidental nature of all social collision has always troubled the mother, even before she was a mother. To have a nationality, a lover, a family, a coworker, a neighbor—the mother understands these to be fundamentally absurd connections, as they are accidents, and yet they are the tyrants of every life. After she rolled up her window, she approached the drive-through speaker and ordered. The man hit the glass of the next car with his beach shovel, his eyes wide open.

Now, when the baby pushes away, the mother offers him milk from her left breast, but he refuses it. She burps him against her toweled shoulder, flooded with chemical love for this fragile being. He fusses. She rocks him. Within fifteen minutes, he’s asleep again. This is life, she has learned, with a newborn: it’s easing someone into and out of consciousness, over and over, providing sustenance in between. As though infants inhabit a different planet, one that orbits its sun four times faster than Earth does. If you want to understand the human condition, pay close attention to infants: the stakes are simultaneously at their highest, because you could die at any moment, and at their lowest, because someone bigger is satisfying every need. Language and agency have not yet arrived. What’s that like? Observe a baby.

She places hers in his crib and cracks her neck.

When her husband returns around half past nine at night, his head shelled in the construction hard hat, his boots dusty, his odor of perspiration and sunblock a kind of home, their baby is still asleep. For the first time, the mother realizes she hasn’t spoken to anyone all day. She meant to take the baby for a walk but forgot. Television and radio did not occur to her. Fourteen hours tense and alone, panning the day for peril.

She hands her husband a plate of fish sticks and ketchup.

What a feast. He smiles, kissing her bare shoulder. Thanks, baby.

Don’t call me that, she doesn’t say. You’re welcome, she means to say, but she can’t remember how to transport words out of her head and into the world. It’s been years, she feels, since she tried.

Hey, I’m really sorry about Elsie Blitz, her husband says as he washes his hands. That must’ve been sad for you.

The mother blinks rapidly, as though trying to clear something from her vision. What?

Elsie Blitz is the star of Meet the Neighbors. It was Hope’s mother who first introduced her to the mid-twentieth-century family sitcom. Perhaps because Meet the Neighbors showcases a fraught but affectionate alliance between a conventional housewife and her rascal of a daughter, watching the show was a kind of matrilineal tradition in Hope’s family: when Hope was a kid, her mother viewed it alongside her, just as Hope’s grandmother had viewed it alongside Hope’s mother. Hope still summons the show to her screen when she can’t sleep, gradually identifying more with the mother than the daughter; maybe she’ll watch it with her own child, one day. Elsie Blitz plays Susie Evans, a trouble-loving spitfire at the center of the series. Elsie Blitz was a child so optimally childish, she came to represent all children to Hope. She had a face like an apple, a sunny grin, plentiful confidence. She could tap-dance, sing, and whistle. Her disobedience, however reckless, was always redeemed by the fun that it generated and ultimately forgiven by authorities. As a kid, Hope measured her deficiencies against the idealized Susie Evans, but neither the character nor the actress inspired envy. Just sisterly aspiration. In Hope’s mind, Elsie Blitz was forever frozen at the age of eleven—the age of Susie Evans in the series finale. It had been so nice to know that at least one person in the world would never have to grow up.

Her husband sits down at the kitchen table, his posture freighted with guilt, like he’s accidentally disclosed someone else’s secret. I thought you would’ve heard by now. He frowns. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise.

Why? What happened?

She passed away today, her husband replies. She was in her eighties.

The mother braces for a feeling that never arrives. It’s as though she’s underwater, and the news exists above her, on a dock. Oh, she finally says. Sad.

Her husband studies her with concern but drops the subject. While they eat—while he eats—she considers telling her husband about the eye phobia. She has considered telling him every night for four weeks. Hey, she could say, once she remembered how to talk normally. There’s this weird thing. This weird thing that’s been happening, sort of funny, nothing crazy, just weird.

How’s our big guy? the husband asks between bites.

The mechanics of speech return to her, jerky at first. He’s… Not big. He’s tiny, she wants to scream. He needs to be rescued from his own smallness, like everyone else! She swallows a glassful of water in one breath. Babies. What I like about babies. Her eyes lose focus.

Hm?

"Babies know that just because you have it easy doesn’t mean that life is easy."

Her husband chews a fish stick. So he’s alive?

She nods.

Terrific. He smooths her eyebrow, his finger rough. I love you, he says. You’re tired, huh?

There’s this… She fixes her eyes on the smoke detector. This funny thing, that’s been happening.

Oh yeah? What’s that?

She hesitates. Her husband believes that she is a good mother, a normal person, a worthy investment. I’m scared….

Her husband puts down his fork, takes her seriously. What?

Nothing. She begins to cry as quietly as she can. I’m—so—tired.

Her husband wipes his mouth and studies her with his dark and searching eyes. Babe, he says. He stands and takes her back in his hands, kneading muscles and skin, and she wonders who designs costumes for bearded dragons, what species will study evidence of hers in 90 million years, and what misunderstandings will result. What would a nuclear explosion feel like? Would the death be instantaneous? Are there physical buttons involved? Will her busted vagina ever resume its life as a pussy? Where did the dead mouse land after she flung it out of their window? Where is that man she saw at the drive-through, and what is he doing right now? Is this the most valuable work of her life? Is she a psychopath? Is she a threat to them all?

Oh, babe, he says. Of course you are.

What?

Of course you’re tired.

---

—

C6: Ida and Reggie, both in their seventies, sit in their living room, smoking cigarettes and watching the news on high volume. Bad factory fire in Detroit, Michigan. Pageant queen starts nonprofit phone-case business, proceeds funding dental care for refugees. Superpest destroying monocrops of pepper in Vietnam.

Ida remembers what she wanted to tell Reggie earlier that afternoon.

Reggie. She coughs. Reggie.

What?

Can you hear me, Reggie?

Huh?

Turn it down.

Huh?

"Turn it down. I got to tell you something."

He presses a gnarled thumb to the remote. What?

Frank’s in jail again, announces Ida.

Tina’s Frank?

What other Frank do we have?

What’d he do this time?

What do you think?

Another robbery?

Ida nods. This time he had a gun.

I thought that knee surgery would keep him out of trouble.

Bad knee can’t stop a dog like Frank.

Well, feels good to be right all along, I guess. Reggie takes a long drag. We did what we could.

He had that flashy car, mumbles Ida. Those stupid boots.

I just hope Tina knows she can’t come whining to us, hauling her kids over to do ‘chores’ around the place and expecting us to pay them.

We should’ve tried something different, says Ida. One of those barefoot schools. Piano lessons. Vitamins. No gluten. None of the kids turned out right.

Ida, it’s done and gone now. Tina’s a grown woman. The best thing we can do for her is let her take care of herself.

Ida bobs a cigarette between her teeth.

And you’re wrong, Reggie says. The kids turned out fine. He restores the volume of the news. Australian parents beg national governments to rescue their daughters and grandchildren from camps in Syria. Their Australian daughters married ISIS members, and now they face unspeakable violence. Can scientists successfully grow a human kidney in a pig? Not yet but stay tuned. Groundwater contaminated in North Dakota. Celebrity baby born with hypertrichosis, colloquially referred to as werewolf syndrome. A thirteen-year-old girl goes viral for shaving bars of soap. It’s just a simple supply-and-demand kind of situation, she says with a shrug when questioned. Her channel has made her a millionaire. I listen to what the people want.

When the news anchor asks her to explain ASMR to boomers, she takes a deep breath, like she’s bracing for liftoff. "Okay, well, it stands for autonomous sensory meridian response. It’s these tingles some people get around their skull? And kind of down their spine? You feel like—like you’re shimmering or something. It’s the best feeling I know. There are all sorts of triggers. The rustle of leaves or whatever, someone taking your photograph. A really special present, made just for you. Haircuts. Bob Ross. Anyway, I get it whenever someone’s paying very close attention to something else. Back when I was little, I thought either everyone felt it and nobody talked about it, or nobody felt it except for me. Either way, I knew to keep my trap shut. But then, when I was maybe eleven, there was this thing in the news about it, and suddenly we all found each other. It was like a revolution. I mean—revelation. I

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.