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

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Description

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. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (June 27, 2023)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593467876


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 79


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.84 x 8 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #44,547 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #835 in Psychological Fiction (Books) #927 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books) #3,843 in Literary Fiction (Books)


#835 in Psychological Fiction (Books):


#927 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books):


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • What a magnificent work of fiction!
I just finished this amazing novel, and it has left me stunned. I've been an avid reader of novels since I was a teenager. I've probably read nearly a thousand over the last 60 or so years. And, I have never read any novel that left me shivering from the tension created in the last 50 pages of this book. I highly recommend this work of art. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2024 by Happy Dog Owner
    • Mostly great
Mostly great. Inventive, sharply observed, witty, bold. Cons: the book honestly feels like it consists of something like 80% description/exposition and 15% backstory. Every character gets paragraphs and paragraphs of description, and there are numerous characters. Same for places/setting. This is excellent and fun to read for awhile, but across the book it came to feel exhausting, mainly because it detracts from a reader’s ability to sustain the dream of the story and drop away into the imagined world of the book. An awareness of the author herself, and the cleverness employed in the language of this book, overrode my ability to focus on the characters—I was constantly reminded the characters were being wrung into existence by all that description rather than just getting to know them by following them through action. The book insisted that I keep noticing the author instead, when my favorite books are the ones so seamless and elegant I drop into the fictive world and forget about the author entirely. There also is, in the end, very little present action in this book. I believe that’s why people have a hard time describing it—not because of some of its eccentric elements, but because so little happens. The summary of this book could be: a lot of people, places, and things are described, at LENGTH, using inventive language. Though even that language holds odd reiterations throughout—a repeated stance against vegans, suburbia, patterned wallpaper, and the color beige, among others, including a lot of overstatement/over-thought on the distinction between what is real and what is not—numerous characters struggle with that divide, and it gets to be exhaustive. Lastly, (and be warned, somewhat of a spoiler ahead) I’m bothered by the animal violence as well as the structure and use of violence as the primary engine of this narrative. The “hook” of the book—what the author clearly knowingly employs to grip readers and keep them turning the pages—is the threat and actualization of violence against a young woman. The opening pages of the book trick the reader into thinking something even worse than what actually occurs with blandine will happen at the end, and I feel this is a terrible and ugly bait and switch. For a book that has no hesitation arguing for social justice in a wide variety of areas, those arguments ultimately ring false and empty when the entire narrative—it’s known selling point and propulsive force—is violence against a woman. Can we call this tired theme inventive, after all, regardless of the sparkly language in which it’s described? A brilliant, economically poor, unconventionally beautiful young girl being seduced by an older man is at this point such a reiterated relationship dynamic in celebrated fiction that I'm starting to wonder/worry about what it says about general cultural appetites (see: Luster, Great Circle, Fates and Furies, How Much of These Hills is Gold etc. etc. etc.) What's especially painful about The Rabbit Hutch is that these scenes of sexual violence ultimately have no bearing or effect on the main events of the book, meaning they were completely gratuitous, and that is not the type of writing I like to read. Overall: with more editing and less use of sexual and animal violence as a hook to engage readers (without much point or purpose beyond that function) I would give this great debut the full five stars. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2022 by Amanda Gram-Wilder
    • From Monrovia, Indiana To Vacca Vale, Indiana
Reading Tess Gunty's National Book Award winning novel "The Rabbit Hutch" reminded me of "Monrovia, Indiana" an outstanding documentary film from 2018 directed by Frederick Wiseman. I saw the film at the AFI Theater near my home, and it has stayed with me. I would like to see it again. The film is set in the small town of Monrovia, roughly in central Indiana with a population of about 1600. Over its 143 minute length, the film shows the lives of the members of the community at work, play, worship, in serious events and at play. The film had a feeling of realism, without ideology or judging. The primary audience for the film was educated individuals in the urban centers of the East and West, Some of the polarizaion in American life involves the tension between rural and urban areas, a tension that rose in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Wiseman's film offered a valuable perspective. The official synopsis of the film states: “The film explores the conflicting stereotypes and illustrates how values like community service, duty, spiritual life, generosity and authenticity are formed, experienced and lived. The film gives a complex and nuanced view of daily life in Monrovia and provides some understanding of a rural, mid-American way of life that has always been important in America but whose influence and force have not always been recognized or understood in the big cities on the east and west coasts of America and in other countries.” (quoted on wiki page for the film) I had hoped that Gunty's novel might offer a restrained, thoughtful view of a middle American town in Indiana as did Wiseman's film. Her novel is set in Vacca Vale, Indiana, which, is a larger version of Monrovia, an industrial rather than a farming town, and fictitious. In the novel Vacca Vale is part of the rust belt. For many years, the town was prosperous and the home to many workers in the automobile industry. The auto manufacturer left the town, leaving poverty, crime, loneliness, and severe environmental pollution in its wake. Some less than well-intentioned efforts are underway throughout this story to revive the town and bring back prosperity, at least for some. The title "The Rabbit Hutch" refers to a dilapidated apartment building which houses a variety of Vacca Vale's poor and lost. The decrepit character of the building allows little room for privacy. The novel follows the lives of several residents of the Rabbit Hutch. Their backgrounds and lives are diverse and eccentric. The stories are extreme and hit the reader on the head with a hammer. The main character is an eighteen year old, Blandina, who lives in an apartment in the Rabbit Hutch with three young men. Each of the four are former residents of foster homes who are trying to make it on their own. Understandably, sexual tension develops between the three young men and their female roomate. Blandina, a promising and bright student, has dropped out of school and works in a cheap restaurant. She has a mystical temperament and reads about great women medieval mystics including Hildegarde of Bingen and St. Teresa of Avila. The novel follows her life over the course of about a week and her relationship to the roomates and to other residents of the Rabbit Hutch. In the course of reading I had different responses to the novel. Portions of the book are beautiful and incisive as Gunty describes her characters and their varied backstories. The discussions of mysticism are inspiring. The book captures the poignancy of a once thriving town which has fallen on hard times and which is making some efforts at recovery. Some of the material in the book could form the basis for a portrayal of a rust belt town, along the lines that Wiseman achieved in his portrayal of the farming town of Monrovia, Indiana. Alas, it was not to be. The novel is long and herky-jerk. It wanders and, with the impressiveness of some of the individual scenes, is difficult to follow and didn't hold my attention. But the problem with the book is deeper. While some of the book shows people trying to live their lives in the face of economic and personal misfortune, the novel, for the most part, doesn't allow the characters to speak for themselves. The book is more of a social criticism of Vacca Vale and of the economic system responsible for the town's present difficult times. The novel is concerned with large ideas, such as the failings of late capitalism, selfishness, pervasive ignorance, male toxic sexuality, male domination, phoniness, cruelty to animals, American class structure, and much more. It is too much to discuss well, takes the author away from her characters, and is preachy and ideological. The book, unlike "Monrovia, Indiana", does not let the characters speak for themselves but instead imposes the author's beliefs and understanding of their lives upon them. Although there was promising material in "The Rabbit Hutch" it was disjointed,shrill, and ultimately left me with the sense that it was moved more by ideology and by social and political commitments than by the story and the characters. I became increasing dissilusioned with the book over the course of my reading. The journey from Monrovia to Vacca Vaca, Indiana was disappointing. Robin Friedman ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2023 by robin friedman
    • Take a journey...
What stories! So many you get to know through one event. Connections, and lack thereof is the center of the realities, and unrealities of the characters. At the beginning I found it hard to fully engage and then I was hooked. I highlighted pieces that so well describe pain and life and figuring out how to make it through. I loved this read! ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2024 by Kindle Customer

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