book review the rabbit hutch

One Apartment Building, Many Lives

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

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By Leah Greenblatt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leah Greenblatt is a critic at large at Entertainment Weekly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wayne catan, more online by wayne catan.

• Stone and Shadow

The Rabbit Hutch

By tess gunty, reviewed by wayne catan.

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

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

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

The sensation that disturbs Blandine most profoundly as she walks across her small city is that of absence … Empty factories, empty neighborhoods, empty promises, empty faces. Contagious emptiness that infects every inhabitant. Vacca Vale, to Blandine, is a void, not a city.

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

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

Much of The Rabbit Hutch focuses on Blandine’s loneliness and search for happiness as she drifts through her city, interacting with customers at the diner, her roommates, Joan in C2, and a music teacher. Although a high-school dropout, Blandine is an intellectual who reads Dante in her spare time and finds inspiration in the work of Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen: “The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed!” Blandine’s favorite place is one worthy of Bingen herself, the fittingly named Chastity Valley. It’s an orientation point, a place where Blandine can get her bearings:

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

As the rest of The  Rabbit   Hutch unfolds, the reader learns more about the music teacher, encounters several scenes of animal sacrifice, and witnesses the bizarre behavior of a former child actor’s son. But it is the activities of the four teenagers in apartment C4—especially one night after Blandine brings home an injured goat—that are at the heart of the book.

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

Published on November 4, 2022

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Tess Gunty’s Debut Sends Readers Down the Rabbit Hole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rabbit Hutch: A novel

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

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THE RABBIT HUTCH

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

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

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

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

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-53466-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE

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More About This Book

New York Times Bestseller

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

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

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

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

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

PERSPECTIVES

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

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

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

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

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unlifelike life

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

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

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

This is an important American novel, a portrait of a dying city and, by extension, a dying system. Its propulsive power is not only in its insight and wit, but in the story of this ethereal girl who has been brutalised by a system over and over again and yet keeps trying to resolve and save it. She is so vibrantly alive and awake that when I finished this book, I wanted to feel that. I wanted to walk outside. I wanted what is real. I wanted to wake up. Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is breathtaking, compassionate and spectacular.

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Briefly Noted

The Rabbit Hutch , by Tess Gunty (Knopf) . Although there are actual rabbits in this ambitious novel, the “Hutch” of the title is the name given to an affordable-housing complex by its residents, in a post-industrial Indiana town. Gunty zooms in and out of the apartments, pushing the lives inside toward a forceful and violent climax; her central character is a gifted though troubled teen who grew up with foster families, has dropped out of high school, and calls herself Blandine. (Obsessed with female medieval mystics, she takes the name of a French martyr.) Despite offering a dissection of contemporary urban blight, the novel doesn’t let social concerns crowd out the individuality of its characters, and Blandine’s off-kilter brilliance is central to the achievement.

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

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

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

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

Andrew Limbong

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

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

The big names in the literary world gathered in New York City last night for the National Book Awards. How did they not invite me? Anyway, it was a big night celebrating the best American books and authors from the past year. But a recent rise in book bannings hung over the night. NPR's Andrew Limbong reports.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PADMA LAKSHMI: Hi, everybody.

ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: The issue of parents and politicians restricting books in schools and libraries, particularly books that include LGBTQ characters or that tackle themes of racism, was something many of the speakers last night addressed directly. Television host and author Padma Lakshmi hosted the ceremony and brought it up in her opening remarks.

LAKSHMI: Deciding what books are in school libraries is the job of librarians, not politicians. Where are my librarians at?

LIMBONG: And so did the two recipients of the lifetime achievement awards - Tracie D. Hall from the American Library Association, who was given the Literarian Award...

TRACIE D HALL: It is a universal truth that one of the real tests of liberty is the right to read.

LIMBONG: ...And Art Spiegelman, whose graphic novel, "Maus," became the center of a book banning culture war at a Tennessee school district earlier this year. The book depicts his father's journey through Auschwitz. After being awarded for his distinguished contribution to American letters, he said he didn't think the incident was driven wholly by antisemitism.

ART SPIEGELMAN: Everyone just wanted a kinder, gentler Holocaust to teach, as well as wanting to control thought and maybe eviscerate trust in public education so that tax money can be diverted toward private and religious schools.

LIMBONG: But then there was the business to get on to - awarding the best books of the year. In fiction, the award went to Tess Gunty, whose debut novel, "The Rabbit Hutch," is about four teenagers, too old for the state's foster care system, living together in a subsidized apartment building in a fictional town in the post-industrial Midwest. Here she is at an event the previous night, reading the opening.

TESS GUNTY: (Reading) On a hot night in apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She's only 18 years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen.

LIMBONG: The translated literature award went to Samanta Schweblin from Argentina and translator Megan McDowell for the short story collection "Seven Empty Houses." The award for young people's literature went to Sabaa Tahir, whose YA novel "All My Rage" jumps between Lahore, Pakistan, and Juniper, Calif. And the poetry award went to John Keene, whose acceptance speech hit on the big topic of the night.

JOHN KEENE: Lastly, I urge you to support libraries and librarians.

LIMBONG: But also the other thing hanging over the night's proceedings - the nearly 250 workers for publisher HarperCollins who are currently on strike demanding better wages.

KEENE: Support workers in the publishing industry and every industry.

LIMBONG: And the nonfiction award went to professor Imani Perry, whose book "South To America" is a rigorous examination of the American South. But as you can tell from her acceptance speech, her writing doesn't come from a place of rote history.

IMANI PERRY: I write for my people. I write because we children of the lash-scarred, rope-choked, bullet-ridden desecrated are still here, standing.

LIMBONG: But instead, like the rest of the writers, it comes from somewhere deeper.

PERRY: I write for you. I write because I love sentences, and I love freedom more.

Copyright © 2022 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Look Inside

The Rabbit Hutch

A Novel (National Book Award Winner)

By Tess Gunty

By tess gunty read by tess gunty , scott brick , suzanne toren , kirby heyborne and kyla garcia, category: literary fiction, category: literary fiction | audiobooks.

Jun 27, 2023 | ISBN 9780593467879 | 5-3/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9780593467879 --> Buy

Aug 02, 2022 | ISBN 9780593534663 | 6-1/4 x 9-1/4 --> | ISBN 9780593534663 --> Buy

Aug 02, 2022 | ISBN 9780593534670 | ISBN 9780593534670 --> Buy

Aug 02, 2022 | 713 Minutes | ISBN 9780593627983 --> Buy

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Jun 27, 2023 | ISBN 9780593467879

Aug 02, 2022 | ISBN 9780593534663

Aug 02, 2022 | ISBN 9780593534670

Aug 02, 2022 | ISBN 9780593627983

713 Minutes

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About The Rabbit Hutch

The Rabbit Hutch is a stunning debut novel about four teenagers—recently aged out of the state foster-care system—living together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest, exploring the quest for transcendence and the desire for love. “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, best-selling, award-winning author of Luster The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving its residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, lives one of these people, a young girl named Blandine Watkins, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine lives alongside three teenage boys, all recently aged out of the state foster-care system, all of them madly in love with Blandine. Plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her, Blandine pays no mind to their affection. All she wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads.  Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a group of people looking for ways to live in a dying city, a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents—especially Blandine—go to achieve it? Does one person’s gain always come at another’s expense? Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.

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

Listen to a sample from The Rabbit Hutch

About tess gunty.

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

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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 “[ The Rabbit Hutch ] paints a picture of its location…you can get to know everything…history, people, and minutiae… It’s a brilliant meditation on how much we don’t know about our nearest neighbors, and how the places we live can bring us together—or tear us apart.” —Bekah Waalkes, The Atlantic “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)

National Book Award WINNER 2022

National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize FINALIST 2022

Mark Twain Award SHORTLIST 2023

Author Q&A

If we drove through Vacca Vale, Indiana—the fictional town where The Rabbit Hutch takes place—what would we see? Snaking up the center of the city is the Vacca Vale River, now toxic. Everything is near the River, and the River is the reason for the town. Downtown Vacca Vale expands in a circle in the middle of the city. It’s filled with derelict but ornate and cakelike architecture, most of which was built in a more hopeful era. You’ll find Ampersand, the pie diner where Blandine works, near those buildings. To the north of downtown stands a neighborhood of old, magnificent mansions in various states of splendor or decay, built in the early-twentieth-century by affluent people who worked for the now-dead automobile company, Zorn. Some are vacant, some have been converted into museums, and some are occupied. To the west of those houses scatter a few gloomy businesses: the Vacca Vale cinema, a strip mall, the Wooden Lady Motel, and the Zorn Museum. To the north of the historic houses sprawls industrial farmland. The entire Northern swath of Vacca Vale has been commandeered by corn and soybean monocrops, suburbia, the town’s only private high school (which Blandine attends), and a few mega churches. Chastity Valley, our heroine’s favorite part of her city, is situated southeast of downtown. Over five hundred acres, the Valley is shaped like an arrow pointing east. Southwest of downtown is a campus of abandoned Zorn factories, now canvases for graffiti artists. Finally, the building where most of my characters live—La Lapinière, or the Rabbit Hutch—stands near those factories. The Rabbit Hutch is a repurposed building from the late nineteenth-century that once housed factory workers. The Rabbit Hutch shares a street with a small Christian church, a Christian laundromat, a Christian women’s shelter, and a convenience store. If you were to take an aimless drive through Vacca Vale, you’d see foreclosed shops and boarded-up houses. A sports bar, a fast-food chain, a tanning salon, a thrift store, a liquor store, and a vape store. A tin-paneled shop with vacant lots on either side of it and plywood nailed to its windows. A rusty door. Vines reclaiming brick foundations. There’s a story that Hildegard wrote in the twelfth century which Blandine quotes at some point in the novel, and I think it captures the spiritual essence of Vacca Vale. Hildegard writes that the Devil was jealous of God because God created everything. The only thing that God hadn’t yet created was nothing, so the Devil created nothing, and fell through that nothing and is falling still. I find that to be a phenomenal origin story of evil, but also a perfect description of fundamentally abandoned places like Vacca Vale. Vacca Vale may be filled with junk, vacant buildings, billboards, trash, churches, gas stations, strip malls, intersections, but the accumulation of these objects in this place evoke absence rather than presence. People are falling down the Nothing. You were raised in South Bend, Indiana. To what extent were you thinking of South Bend while you were writing about—and building the world of—Vacca Vale? Vacca Vale is a patchwork of the Rust Belt towns I know: Gary, Indiana; Flint, Michigan; Youngstown, Ohio. There was a powerful purgatorial sensation that would invade me as soon as I approached a town that had suffered a similar economic fate as my own, South Bend, and this novel was my effort to conjure that sensation in language. It’s like wearing cold damp clothes in the basement of a building where it is always 4 p.m. Low ceilings, beige everything. A doorless, windowless waiting room with no one at the desk and no distractions. You just have to sit on a metal chair until your name is called. When writing The Rabbit Hutch , I wanted to create an otherworldly place that wasn’t perfectly bound to the governing rules of so-called reality, a fundamentally unstable environment that summoned eccentricities, crimes, ghosts. I set the novel in a fictional city because I needed to be free of geographic likeness so that I could better evoke emotional likeness. But Vacca Vale was, as the question suggests, predominantly modeled on South Bend, which is where I spent the first 22 years of my life. It was the place that introduced me to that purgatorial sensation, producing a supernatural familiarity with it that allowed me to detect it at once in another landscape. My hometown was a land of abandoned factories, unnatural stretches of industrial crops, signage for long-dead businesses, disposable city design, permacloud, no spring. The closest strip mall to my house had a tanning bed, a thrift store, a liquor store, a vape store, a pet store, a video store, and a Starbucks; this seems to encapsulate the coping mechanisms and needs of my abandoned community. When I was in high school, South Bend ranked on Newsweek’s list of “Top Ten Dying American Cities.” To me, this public diagnosis was almost comforting, like a confirmation of a long-suspected illness. At the very least, it gave the illness a name, gave the symptoms a cause. Vacca Vale is what I imagine South Bend would be like if the University of Notre Dame didn’t exist. South Bend was once the home of Studebaker Automobiles, which in its heyday was the largest car manufacturing facility in America. But after reigning for nearly a hundred years, the industry closed in the 1960s. Notre Dame was already there to absorb some of the economic shock, and it quickly became the dominant employer, the primary god of town identity. But despite Notre Dame’s existence, countless people were still left behind when the automobile industry closed; not everyone can transition from a job at a factory to one at a private university. Some families didn’t recover for generations. Many are still recovering. Born 30 years after the fall of Studebaker, I grew up sensing that our city was haunted by its former economic glory. Rates of poverty and its attending consequences were much higher than the national average, astronomically higher than Indiana’s average. I saw evidence of these consequences every day in my neighborhood. Theft, bankruptcy, foreclosure, addiction, sexual assault, police brutality, and gun violence didn’t occur in abstract statistics—they occurred in events of horrific particularity, harming singular members of my community, bulldozing lives. While none of these stories ended up in The Rabbit Hutch (they don’t belong to me), they certainly informed the worldview of the novel. Our own house was robbed twice, our car was once towed by the bank, a close friend who lived ten feet from me suffered from varied manifestations of neglect and maltreatment, and we frequently heard shootings nearby. When I was in college, I read that a baby had been accidentally shot and killed in a drive-by just a few blocks away from my home. In short, the violence throughout The Rabbit Hutch was inspired by the many scales and manifestations of violence I witnessed in South Bend. I wanted to trace interpersonal violence and neglect to the structural violence and neglect that engineered it. Poverty forecloses opportunities, producing tremendously pressurized communities. Our public school system consistently underperforms, and plenty of students in South Bend are never presented with a good reason to finish high school; what’s the point if you’ve never seen the degree deliver anyone you know to a better life? When people are robbed of hope, when most of the roads to pursue health and financial security are closed, when women are forced to give birth before they’re ready to due to a combination of cultural pressure and a lack of reproductive services, when chemical escape becomes more appealing than reality, violence is inevitable. This inevitability demonstrated itself over and over again in my city. In 2016, the year Trump was elected—the year I began writing The Rabbit Hutch —violent crime in South Bend increased by nearly 44% from the year before. When our mayor, Pete Buttigieg, began his campaign for presidency in 2019, headlines from far-right publications labeled South Bend as “one of the most dangerous cities in America.” These articles were intended to smear his reputation and they were filled with inaccuracies, but the headlines themselves were not sensational. (What they failed to mention was that he dramatically improved many things before he left office and that he inherited an unusually arduous job.) In 2020, rates of violent crime including assault, homicide, rape, and domestic abuse all increased; homicide alone increased by 87 per cent. In 2020, there were 1,728 violent crimes committed for every 100,000 residents in South Bend; the national average was 399. South Bend was a place where national injustices are made personal, visible, and abundant. You can see the climate crisis, there, too—not just in the severe weather that has been wreaking havoc the industrial farmland there, but also in the city’s increased flooding. South Bend is so-named because it’s situated on the southernmost bend of the St. Joe River. Within the span of eighteen months, the town experienced a 500-year flood and a 1,000-year flood. And then there were the stories people told me about growing up in South Bend, which were very present to me as I wrote. My father grew up outside Chicago and my mother’s family settled in Northern California, so I learned about the history of my town through other people. Throughout high school, I worked at a bread bakery, and every weekend I operated its stand at the local Farmer’s Market. There, people would stop at my booth and tell me the stories of their lives, sometimes for hours; I was honored and surprised by their trust. The voices of these people—most of whom were elderly, left behind by family and friends, failed by structures that were only beginning to become visible to me—took up residence in my mind and never left, expanding my understanding of our collective home, the infinite lives available there, the patterns detectable among them. In college, when I read Eliot’s The Wasteland or Dante’s Divine Comedy or Thomas’s Under Milk Wood or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , I recognized the language as though I had read it before, I felt I was reading the landscapes of my brain; these texts felt like home because I’d spent my whole life in the weather they brewed. Still, I had never seen a city like mine explicitly represented in fiction. In childhood, this seemed like a good reason to set all of my writing elsewhere. In my twenties, this seemed like a good reason to set all of my writing—unapologetically, ecstatically—in the postindustrial Midwest. Even when I tried to set a novel in a dystopic future, or New York City, I was always pulled back to a place like South Bend; it had something it needed me to say. I now appreciate growing up in a place where the brutality of industrial appetites was visible. My high school was situated across from a dog food factory, which paused production during school hours but was active in summers, when I had soccer practice twice a day. Running 8-miles of intermittent sprints in 99-degree heat with 100 per cent humidity through the pungent odor of fish guts is an experience you never forget. (I couldn’t resist placing a dog food factory across from Blandine’s high school in the novel.) In America’s popular, pricey, coastal cities, modes of production—the machines, chemicals, and labor that facilitate our conveniences—are mostly concealed. But in so many neglected regions of this country, the Anthropocene is visible everywhere you look. In a city like South Bend, the price of industrial convenience is one you pay, and the consequences are far more hazardous than a bad smell. The cancerous chemicals of coal mines, factories, and farms are in your soil, your water, your baby, your air. The extractive economy is visibly extracting from your family, making your parents sink in debt, making your sister infertile, turning your cousins into conspiracy theorists. Your childhood friend met his wife in treatment for opioid addiction. I put other things I loved about South Bend in The Rabbit Hutch, too: I cherished the humid summer nights, the wonky Catholic iconography, the humility, the way people really listen to each other even if one person is telling a long, bad anecdote. There’s desperation, yes, but also jagged and mesmerizing beauty. Poverty and violence collide with otherworldly splendor. Death and God are looked in the eye. Nothing is more itself than when it’s next to its opposite; blue is bluest when it’s beside orange. The devastation was especially devasting and the celestial especially celestial because these things were indivisible, the sacred was bound to the profane and the occult was bound to the ordinary. You learned to alchemize despair into humor, to seek transcendence in the pedestrian, to cultivate faith in people. Once, when I attended a Ravel performance at the New York Philharmonic, the woman next to me—a native Manhattanite in furs—asked where I was from. I had half a draft of The Rabbit Hutch written at the time. When I replied Indiana, she gasped. I never would have guessed! she told me as if this were a compliment. You got the impression that she had never left the Upper West Side except to go to Europe; it was easy to imagine her with a judgmental Pomeranian and jewelry insurance. I didn’t know anyone was actually from Indiana! Did you turn the lights off when you left? The Rabbit Hutch is my effort to keep the lights on after I left. Indeed, to make them brighter. Throughout the course of the novel, we hear the voices of several tenants of the Rabbit Hutch, a run-down apartment building at the edge of town: a young mother who’s terrified of her newborn’s eyes, a widowed logger who’s taken to dating apps, an aging couple who keep finding dead mice on their balcony, a group of four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster care system. Whose voice came to you first? Whose voice was came to you loudest? Joan’s voice came to me first. I was 23, I had written hundreds of labored pages that inevitably nauseated me, I was having a numinous experience with The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams, Brooklyn was finally melting after winter, and I had just listened to a radio program that included a brief interview with a person who screened comments for an obituary website. Afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about that job. I know I have to take an idea back to the laboratory when it starts sprouting neon mushrooms on the dirt floor of my brain. To spend your days treading in the guest books of online obituaries! What would such an occupation do to you over time? I’m usually drawn to things that contain what Joyelle McSweeney refers to as an “infernal superposition of states,” things that are “double but not binary.” As usual, it was the contrast bound within the job—the absurd and the serious, the humdrum and the supernatural, the internet and the afterlife—that I found so magnetic. After listening to the radio program, I wrote a scene in which a lonely, middle-aged obituary comment screener feels so guilty about the unthanked holiday gifts she receives from her aunt that she’s driven to donate them to a woman who lives on her street. This scene launched a five-year devotion to a Word document that would become The Rabbit Hutch. Somehow, I’d saved enough money from my student stipend to write full-time that summer. Every morning, I’d walk to Prospect Park with a notebook and books and a five-dollar beach towel, leaving all my electronics at home. I suspect that much of The Rabbit Hutch was a heat hallucination. In the humidity of Prospect Park, each character arrived on my psychological doorstep bearing nothing but his or her most eccentric quality, like punchlines who are missing their jokes. A man who punishes his enemies by covering himself with the liquid of broken glow sticks and breaking into their homes. A teenage girl who just aged out of the state foster system and now longs to become a mystic. Three teenage boys who find themselves sacrificing animals to express their love for her. A dying celebrity who finds it impossible to care about anyone except for the endangered Three-Toed Pygmy Sloth. A young mother terrified of her newborn’s eyes. Jack’s voice was the strongest. In New York, I spent so much time with the collective male gaze in the archery of street harassment, I thought it would be interesting to swap perspectives and narrate from it. Because Jack’s voice was so distinct from my own, it arrived to me with ease and clarity, as though I were merely overhearing it. The task of the next five years was to create characters who were breathing people, not jokes. To create a world where these peculiar behaviors were not only believable, but inevitable. What were you hoping to achieve by writing a polyphonic novel and allowing a multiplicity of voices and storylines and perspectives to populate these pages? When I began writing The Rabbit Hutch , I was reading a lot of contemporary polyphonic fiction and the structure increasingly bewitched me. At the time, I was desperately searching for a realer realism, and I found these structures much more successful at conjuring the tumultuous, choral experience of consciousness than single-perspective novels. (Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, chief among them Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.) Instead of buckling you into a single life and driving you from point A to point B through a chronological Three Act Structure, polyphonic novels set you loose in a lush and complex ecosystem. In a good novel, every life form, no matter how small, is essential for the health of the whole. It’s up to you to listen for the resonances, to learn the mechanisms of the interdependent environment, to wander, to get lost. As works like NW , Middlemarch , Great House, A Visit from the Goon Squad, and Infinite Jest illustrate, if your protagonist is not a person—if it’s a place like Northwest London, or an object like a desk, or force like “time,” or a theme like “loneliness”—the novel often requires multiple voices. Mine is not a comprehensive portrait of Vacca Vale—no book is a comprehensive treatment of its subject, thank goodness—but I knew I’d get closer to a balanced composition if I included people of varying ages, histories, occupations, and physical differences. Each character led me by the hand and introduced me to the next. In an interview, Nicole Krauss once said: “One life is not enough.” I often think about that when I write. Writing is a way to access other lives, and also to stage the lives abstractly playing out in the multiverses of our imaginations. Nobody is only herself. If you were to excavate my brain you’d find my three older brothers, my parents, sixty first cousins. You’d find many dramatic reenactments of the Stations of the Cross, a middle-grade novel about kids who time-travel to ancient Egypt, and a library of showtunes. You’d find my fourth-grade teacher alongside the manager of the crêperie in a small French town who opened the restaurant to relieve me and my friend from the rain. There’s the woman who died on my subway car my first Halloween in New York. She’s sitting beside Anne Carson, who’s leaning her head on the shoulder of Simone Weil, who’s accompanied by the scent of lavender bath salts that my mother keeps in the guest room where I stay when I visit. There’s the French boy with one blue eye and one green eye who was studying to be a painter, and the Bologna hostel where I met him. You’d find the great-grandmother I never met who put tacks under the tires of automobiles belonging to members of the KKK; the peach-faced, turtlenecked child on a rocky beach in Nice who repeatedly struck her own head; the 2015 production of Cymbeline in Central Park; the elderly leather-maker who operated the booth beside mine at the Farmer’s Market and often gave me butterscotch candies. You’d find Drew Barrymore in a Renaissance costume repeatedly performing the line: What else is to be concluded, sire, than that you first make thieves and then punish them? You’d find every dog, cat, goat, parakeet, rabbit, hamster, fish, and chinchilla I’ve ever loved. I don’t know how to transcribe a self without transcribing all the life that has passed through it; it’d be like trying to depict the Grand Canyon without its history of water. You and the people with whom you’ve collided aren’t the same, but you’re indivisible. As the novel unfolds, we learn that the local government in Vacca Vale is soon to begin construction on a revitalization plan, designed to turn Vacca Vale “from a dying postindustrial city into a startup hub, attracting talent from around the world.” The developer at the helm of the project is quoted in the local paper: “Urban revitalization plans have failed countless residents in the past. But we won’t fail you.” What would failure look like for the residents of the Rabbit Hutch? Are they already failed from the start? In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase “creative destruction” to describe the cycle of industry innovation and destruction, which he considered “the essential fact about capitalism.” Economically elevated and then gruffly abandoned by the automobile industry, Vacca Vale has already been failed by the cycles of creative destruction, and I think Blandine sees that the urban revitalization plan only promises another. As we’ve seen in San Francisco, the tech industry is an invasive species that tends to consume all the culture, housing, and politics within and beyond its habitat. Blandine doesn’t trust that industry, or the exclusively white male team in charge of the redevelopment. She’s especially skeptical of the head developer, who has never lived in the Midwest but has made a name for himself revitalizing Rust Belt towns. I actually think the developer is probably a decent leader with decent ideas, someone who prioritizes urban health over profit, and I think his plan will improve Vacca Vale overall, but it’s obvious why a person like Blandine—who has been repeatedly failed by systems and individuals, and remains fiercely devoted to Vacca Vale even though she finds it suffocating—would automatically disdain him. The plan has many targets, but the most odious, to Blandine, is Chastity Valley, the only remaining green space in Vacca Vale, and the sole place Blandine has ever considered her home. I imagined Chastity Valley as a wilder, less groomed version of Prospect Park, in which I wrote the foundation of this novel and to which I am madly attached. Blandine also knows that it is possible to redevelop underperforming/already dead areas of the city, like abandoned factories (brownfield sites), and that this would be a more ethical approach, but it’s cheaper to work from a clean slate (greenfield sites). It’s not necessary for the developers to mutilate Chastity Valley to house the tech talent they’re trying to import from coastal cities—it’s just cheaper to bulldoze trees than it is to adaptively re-use vacant buildings. That’s the most damning aspect of the plan, in Blandine’s view, and I think she’s right to oppose it. She knows that it is an urban failure to relinquish a known public good for the dangled carrot of economic growth—a reward that can never be guaranteed. So Blandine primarily wants to protect the Valley, but she takes issue with other aspects of the plan, too. She knows that “trickle down benefits” like jobs, growth, and safety seldom trickle down. I loosely modeled this revitalization campaign off ones that are occurring in reality throughout the Rust Belt. When I was in college, Mayor Buttigieg envisioned South Bend as a potential startup hub for complex reasons involving weather and fiber optic cable, if I recall correctly, but I think he did so more ethically, converting brownfield sites like abandoned Studebaker factories and prioritizing thoughtful urban development. When I was in high school, the state of Michigan launched a campaign to attract tourists called “Pure Michigan,” and they would play these saccharine but alarmingly heartrending advertisements on the radio, voiced by Tim Allen over soft piano music, describing a distinctly Midwestern splendor, a distinctly Midwestern peace, and sometimes, as I was working my shifts at the bakery, these commercials would move me to tears. I think it’s because it described a place that I longed for but did not see. So when I was writing The Rabbit Hutch, it was important for the “Vacca Vale: Welcome Home” campaign to likewise prey upon a collective desire for community, safety, prosperity, and beauty, promising resources to strangers that the city did not deliver to its own residents. In a previous draft, there was a long chapter I ultimately decided to cut that included a speech Blandine intends to read at a community hearing—an in-depth critique of the urban revitalization plan. She mentions that Chastity Valley is home to 493 species, all of whom would suffer from the construction, and that she is “especially disappointed by the plan’s sparse and feeble commitments to sustainability. It does not address sewage remediation that the Vacca Vale River badly needs, nor does it confront the runoff from surrounding soybean and corn farms. The nitrous oxide from these industrial operations causes algae blooms that suffocate our aquatic ecosystems. The glyphosate is causing birth defects, reproductive harm, and cancer. While I appreciate the plan’s gesture at carbon neutrality and its abstract schemes for wind farms and solar panels, these efforts are all phased for a ‘later date.’ As I understand it, this is because such labors have been deemed too costly for the first phase of construction. But the cost of inaction far exceeds the cost of action, and we have lost the privilege of short-term thinking. The development must be built to depend upon renewable resources—if it’s not, we lack the incentive to execute these measures in the future. The federal government has made it clear that it will always fail to act in time. Thus, the imperative to act falls on the shoulders of local governments. There is almost no chance that renewable energy will ever get to Vacca Vale if it isn’t incorporated now, taking advantage of the money, expertise, political will, and momentum. I remind you that, in the past five years, Vacca Vale endured a thousand-year flood and a five-hundred-year flood. The redevelopment plan does not address the river’s increasing propensity to overflow, nor does it respond to the inevitability that the American Midwest will have to produce crops to feed itself as the climate crisis renders agricultural imports unviable.” She goes on to suggest xeriscaping and condemn logging. She censures the plan for failing to eliminate car-dependence, and points out that the proposed public transit system does not reach the low-income neighborhoods of Vacca Vale. The plan proposes no efforts to redress the food deserts and underfunded schools in those districts. She calls the tram through the Valley is “essentially decorative,” as it does not connect to the transit center downtown. There’s no outline for bus routes, and the proposed train system caters to the geographic needs and the social exclusivity of the suburban communities in the Northwest, along with the needs and preferences of the incoming tech communities who will settle in the Valley, doing little for the residents whose families have been in Vacca Vale for generations—the people that the revitalization is supposed to revitalize. She points out that the developers quietly sold land that was previously set aside for smaller-scale, local developers to places like Walmart and Amazon and cable monopolies. She goes on to liberally quote from Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 paper “Ladder of Citizen Participation,” in which Arnstein proposes a typology that ranks eight rungs of community engagement from low-impact to high-impact actions. “I am here to request more than perfunctory engagement from your development team, Mr. Ritter. How will you extend partnership, delegation, and citizen control to the people of Vacca Vale? The theme of your campaign is home . But how can any inhabitant make herself at home in a place where she is powerless to govern her life?” Blandine, whose story is central to the novel, desperately wants to exit her body. What exactly does that mean to her? While Blandine is the only character who explicitly wishes to exit her body, none of my characters have a breezy time inhabiting a body, a consciousness, a world. While I do insist on the difference between me and my characters, I think in order to explain Blandine’s desire to exit her body, it’s helpful to describe my own experiences. As a child, I believed that I could leave my body in that hinterland between consciousness and sleep: I thought I could travel my city in the air, switch bodies with my pets. This seemed like a magical but achievable power. At a young age, I learned about a female mystic—maybe Thérèse de Lisieux—who transcended her body during divine ecstasy, which was described as total unity with God, and God was described as Love. “Indescribable happiness” resulted from this unity. This appealed to me enormously; I was an oversensitive child who often felt trapped in her city, house, family conflicts, financial stress, and anxiety disorder, so that kind of totalizing, ecstatic escape seemed like the only pursuit worth chasing. Later, I learned that my mother felt she had left her body on more than one occasion. Even though I’m not as persuaded by mysticism and magic as I was as a child, in moments of severe physical or psychological pain, I still find myself longing to leave my body, to flee to an existential second home until conditions improve. I believe this is a nearly inevitable condition when you’re raised in a culture that teaches you that your body is not your own. My only rebellion as a teenager was theological. I was raised in a severely Catholic household, school system, and city. It’s hard to exaggerate its grip on my brain. Although my parents were Democrats, my father attended a high school for boys considering the priesthood and worked at retreat houses and ministry for a long time; my mother was in a convent in her twenties and claimed the nuns made her drop out because she was too loud. To this day, she references things the Virgin Mary has done or said—in recent decades, mind you—the same way she references things her sisters do and say: frankly, affectionately. There is a flourishing lore of miracles, signs, and wonders in my maternal family. Throughout childhood, I was extremely religious and often thought I’d be a mystical nun when I grew up. But by the time I was fifteen, armed with a newfound awareness of the Church’s systemic abuses, newly aware of its patriarchy, I launched into a spirited rejection of Catholicism that remains with me today. Planted in the lawn of our Catholic high school were dozens of white crosses: honorary graves of aborted fetuses. In high school, when Obama was running against McCain, the entire student body was forced to spend a homeroom period writing an essay about why it was the Catholic’s moral duty to vote for the anti-abortion candidate (most of us were too young to vote). Everyone around me sleepily scrawled the requisite three paragraphs, then spent the rest of the time on their homework. Powered by teenage rage, I wrote throughout the entire period, arguing that to be truly pro-life is to be anti-death-penalty, anti-war, anti-fossil-fuels, pro-universal-healthcare, pro-social-safety-net, intolerant of racism and welcoming to immigrants. Etc. When the bell rang, I submitted several pages of unhinged, hand-written fury. The teacher accepted my pages with a raised eyebrow. Shortly after that, Barack Obama was invited to give the commencement address at Notre Dame, prompting months of anti-abortion propaganda throughout the city, summoning protesters from far and wide. On the drive to school, my brother and I would pass an enormous billboard featuring a photograph of an aborted fetus. If you see something like that before 8 a.m. every morning, it will permanently lodge into your mind. On the day of Obama’s speech, my brother, his girlfriend, and I went to the University to protest the protesters. I still remember the way a woman’s face seemed to reach off her head as she screamed at me, the total absence of control she seemed to have over herself, as if she were possessed. I protested the Church and its hypocrisy whenever I could with the kind of life-or-death energy you devote to ideologies when you’re young. I was ashamed of almost everything in those days, but I was never ashamed when I publicly confronted a priest about the Church’s sexism, which I did every chance I got, even when it made my peers ashamed on my behalf. When I discovered the countless ways the Church was hurting my friends—some had been abused by priests; some spurned in their communities when their parents divorced; some were rejected for their sexuality; some had to drop out of high school, suffer public humiliation, and give birth against their will because they were denied birth control first and abortion second—my rejection of the Church became absolute. I explained this rejection to my parents, but they continued to force me to attended church every Sunday, so I stopped accepting communion. Once, I tried to stay in the vestibule of the church, but my father threatened me, and that’s when I knew that my parents’ insistence on my Catholicism wasn’t just about faith; it was an assertion of their dominance over my body and mind. Naturally, this made me double-down. I’m sure the sense of entrapment rattling throughout The Rabbit Hutch came from the cage of conservative, Midwestern, patriarchal Catholicism I felt myself to be locked inside. But I now see that that the embodied urgency that Blandine devotes to ideas is also something she inherited from my teenage micro-rebellion. Blandine’s experience of entrapment is much more extreme than mine was because she grew up in the state foster system and suffered abuse at the hands of her caregivers. But as a teenager, I also took refuge in books and ideas and intellectual independence, refusing to yield the real estate of my mind because I felt that my other resources—my body, my time, even my future—were already confiscated. That devotion to ideas is also what made Catholicism so oppressive to me; throughout childhood, I ferociously believed it all. I couldn’t simply brush it off; I was incapable of a casual posture when it came to force-fed creeds. I energetically insisted on freedom of thought because it was my only way to oppose the resounding cultural insistence that my body was a resource that men—politicians, priests, predators, peers—were entitled to exploit and control. I knew that these people could program complexes into me that could take a lifetime to rewire, but in the end, they could not control my beliefs. To be female in Catholic, Midwestern, conservative environments is to be treated as incidental property, useful only as a baby-machine, to be controlled and belittled and hated. Your outfits are policed. You can’t take birth control or have sex. You learn that abortion is evil before you even learn what it is. There’s great pressure to be modestly beautiful, but if a boy tries to have sex with you, it’s your fault. Female masturbation is never mentioned, not once. Sex is something that men alone are supposed to want and enjoy. At a young age, you’re made to believe that getting pregnant before marriage is worse than getting raped, that getting an abortion is worse than murdering an adult. In high school, they made us watched an ultrasound video of an abortion, and I still remember the teacher emphasizing how the fetus flinches away from the surgical tool. Of course, they made abortions sound as though they only occurred in the eighth month. Our religion teachers told stories of women who chose to endure high-risk childbirths rather than terminate, although of course she never words like “terminate.” In the stories, the women often died but the infants always lived, and it was always clear whose life was more important to the Church. The women were heroes, but they were also dead. My paternal grandmother had eleven children, my maternal grandmother had twelve, and this was treated as a source of humorous pride. Recently, I learned that after giving birth six times, my mother’s mother begged a priest to let her use birth control (Catholics aren’t even supposed to use condoms), but the priest refused. Evidence suggests that my grandmother suffered from severe depression, never treated because Catholicism brands mental illnesses as spiritual crises that prayer alone can heal. I had never heard of medication abortions, 3-minute early-stage surgical abortions, or IUDs until I got to graduate school. I can’t overstate the extent of the propaganda. Blandine and I have very different lives, of course, but we share environments. The culture of Vacca Vale would have beaten these messages into Blandine, too. My own moral development and attitude toward my physical autonomy grew in opposition to the suffocating Catholicism around me. Female adolescence in any context is another jolt altogether, a gradual and horrifying awareness that you and your body are distinct. You have to inhabit your body as it morphs into a public resource. It felt like starring in a circus against your will. Between the ages of 15-25, I found the inundation of sexual harassment, intimidation, and violence indescribably surreal. You start to feel like you’re walking around with a target on your back. There were whole years in New York, Boston, and France where I felt like a deer in a forest of hunters—merely walking from one destination to the next could be a harrowing experience, and you never knew when an interaction would turn from annoying to menacing. In my early twenties, I had some experience of harassment—exerted by men I knew or total strangers—on a weekly basis. In a matter of thirty seconds, even if you don’t react at all, a catcall could escalate from: Hey, beautiful , to: I’ll fucking destroy you. These experiences are not unique; every woman I know has a store of them. The events accumulate, make you feel like you’re losing your mind, nearly force you to gently dissociate from your body as you move from one location to the next. I know that Blandine has experienced all of this and worse. By the time we meet her, her physical autonomy has been violated in countless ways, relentlessly, for years. When you don’t feel like your body is your own—when it has been broken into, cosmetically altered, politically regulated, and preemptively treated as the property of any man who wants it—it doesn’t seem like such a leap to exit it altogether. Why does Blandine consider Hildegard von Bingen her only true friend? For reasons both explicit and suggested throughout the course of the novel, Blandine has spent most of her life longing for escape—escape from her town, escape from her body. She’s taken refuge in books, because they are a free and accessible way to travel. Blandine has a roving, exuberant mind of fused contradictions, and she enjoys immersing herself in other roving, exuberant minds of other fused contradictions. When we meet her, she’s developed a fascination with the Catholic female mystics, and while she finds much to admire and contemplate in their work, many these figures are submissive and timid, or at least present as such. While Hildegard occasionally does, too, such performances usually seem engineered to manipulate the male clergy; she can’t conceal her ferocity. This is one thing that sets Hildegard apart: somehow, even when she’s apologizing, she unapologetically embodies authority. She expresses more of the active sorcery we associate with witches than the passive reception we associate with female saints. Hildegard is the first thinker that Blandine has encountered who personifies her highest aspirations: Hildegard possesses an omnivorous curiosity, a polyphonous identity, an ecstatic devotion to nature, access to the supernatural, and a radiant spiritual energy that can withstand systemic abuse and physical illness. In Hildegard’s life and work, Blandine glimpses her most intimate values operating at high volume in another person. From a 21st-century perspective, Hildegard is far from the progressive feminist icon that both Blandine and I would like her to be. Blandine understands that Hildegard is, despite everything, a woman of her time. In her writing, Hildegard explicitly promoted classism, homophobia, transphobia, and sexism. She accepted only aristocratic women into her convent, in part because she was a savvy businesswoman and needed the dowries to build her empire, but also because she herself was born to a noble family and believed God wished for the classes to remain distinct (although, she added, He loves them all equally). Much of her work is wonky, incompressible, and scientifically erroneous. But she was alive in 12th-century Germany, she was a woman, and her pulpit was inside the Catholic Church. If she had been truly radical, the pope would have excommunicated her, as he did many Catholic rabble-rousers of the day. But Hildegard’s imperfection appeals to Blandine, too. If this flawed, morally impure, intellectually inconsistent woman can manage to lead communities, scold the powerful, disobey her own bigoted advice, advance relatively liberal ideas about female sexual health and pleasure, alchemize her migraines into prophecies, create language, music, natural history, medical treatises, then perhaps Blandine can too. Blandine considers herself flawed, morally impure, and intellectually inconsistent. Hildegard suffered from bodily and mental illnesses, the nature of which remains mysterious despite modern attempts to diagnose her. Most appealing to Blandine is Hildegard’s ability to transcend her body, place, and time. There is a problematic fetishization of suffering that persists in the Catholic Church—a belief that to impose physical suffering on oneself is to pay for one’s sins and participate in the redemptive crucifixion of Jesus, which Catholics consider the ultimate act of self-sacrificial love. There are countless reasons to dismantle this mode of thinking (the number of Catholic figures who engage in disordered eating and other forms of self-harm is staggering), but Blandine has already experienced far more than a fair share of physical and psychological suffering by the age of eighteen, and she sees no way out of that suffering but to steer through it, so the notion of suffering as useful, virtuous, redemptive—Blandine finds this profoundly consoling. To read Hildegard is to take a cold swim in a body of water alive with plants and animals you’ve never seen before and you’ll never see again. Some of them will brush you, bite you, help you. The poison is the antidote; Hildegard understood this. Plus, Hildegard can be hilarious. One of her medical treatments involves sewing hamster skins together and creating some kind of cape. She’s very witchy. She has this neon, almost deranged confidence that feels a bit contagious. True, she’s misguided at times, but she’s also a bona fide polymath, and she was right about many things despite her lack of formal education. Hildegard is just a cracking companion, flaws and all. She’s especially compelling to someone as peculiar, brilliant, and incongruous as Blandine.   What do you hope readers take away from The Rabbit Hutch ? At my Catholic elementary school, we had a fairly unhinged religion teacher who interpreted Church teaching literally and sometimes threw chalk at us. When we were twelve or so, she us memorize “The Prayer to St. Gertrude” and recite it every day at the beginning of class. The prayer allegedly liberated 1,000 souls from Purgatory each time it was said. She described Purgatory as a no-man’s-land you entered when you were too bad for Heaven but not bad enough for Hell; a place of indefinite waiting; an unquenchable thirst. Even as a child, it sounded familiar to me. Oh , I thought. We already live there . She made it sound very easy to end up in Purgatory. Let’s say you just went to Confession , she explained, and the priest cleansed you of your sins, but then you have a bad thought on your way out of the Church. And then you get hit by a car and die. You’ve just landed yourself in Purgatory! For this reason, she continued, we had a responsibility to recite the prayer as often as possible. You got a detention if you failed to memorize it. Think of your grandparents! she’d yell at us. They’re stuck there until you set them free! On the blackboard, she kept a chaotic tally of the total number of souls she and her students released each day. At the end of the year, she’d give us candy and announce the grand total—always an incomprehensibly large number. She taught us that one’s release from Purgatory was random, not meritocratic. This made the afterlife seem frenzied and bureaucratic, like the DMV, which made intuitive sense to me. There was something about this practice that made otherworldly realms seem material to me, something about the prayer that built a bridge between my city and the afterlife, and I began to feel like the two places were bonded. Even though I was starting to detach from the zealous Catholicism of my youth, I still felt an obligation to say the prayer. Sometimes I’d find myself reciting it almost unconsciously. Only now—six years after beginning my novel—does it occur to me that The Rabbit Hutch is my secular prayer for the souls trapped in earthly purgatories, an effort to liberate myself and others from the waiting room. As I grew up, it became clear that the story of my hometown was the story of countless places—geographic and psychological—across the Midwest, across America, across the world. I wrote the novel for everyone who has spent time in such a place, for everyone who’s still there. I hope this novel provides welcome company to the reader who has known sustained and aimless longing, a desire to escape a place or a depression or a time or a law or a relationship or a body. I hope it enchants and delights and moves and awakens, as all my favorite writing does for me. I hope it offers an occasion to laugh, to think, to feel less alone. I hope it delivers the reader, as it delivered me, into a more compassionate and luminous place. Most of all, I hope each reader has an experience that is uniquely her own. The writer starts the book, but the reader finishes it with all her sacred particularity. I write and read because the intimate collision of two consciousnesses is the most transcendent experience I know. It’s the only way to live more than one life.

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The Rabbit Hutch : Book summary and reviews of The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

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The Rabbit Hutch

by Tess Gunty

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Published Aug 2022 352 pages Genre: Literary Fiction Publication Information

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

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

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"Gunty debuts with an astonishing portrait of economically depressed Vacca Vale, Ind., centered on the residents of a subsidized apartment building nicknamed the Rabbit Hutch...It all ties together, achieving this first novelist's maximalist ambitions and making powerful use of language along the way. Readers will be breathless." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In the end, this is indeed an American story—a striking and wise depiction of what it means to be awake and alive in a dying building, city, nation, and world. A stunning and original debut that is as smart as it is entertaining." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Gunty is a wonderful writer, a master of the artful phrase...Best of all, her fully realized characters come alive on the page, capturing the reader and not letting go." - Booklist (starred review) "In The Rabbit Hutch , Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies—the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations." - Raven Leilani, author of Luster "Philosophical, and earthy, and tender and also simply very fun to read—Tess Gunty is a distinctive talent, with a generous and gently brilliant mind." - Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch "Just when everything seemed designed for a brief moment of utility before its planned obsolescence, here comes The Rabbit Hutch , a profoundly wise, wildly inventive, deeply moving work of art whose seemingly infinite offerings will remain with you long after you finish it. Each page of this novel contains a novel, a world." - Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated

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Author Information

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

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The Rabbit Hutch

58 pages • 1 hour read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the author

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

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