The Rabbit Hutch
by Tess Gunty
Summary
Vacca Vale, Indiana, is a city the twentieth century used up and left: the Zorn Automobile works that built it are closed hulks, the valley the founders planted is slated for a tech campus nobody believes in, and the municipal rats outnumber the citizens. On its edge stands La Lapinière, an affordable housing block everyone calls the Rabbit Hutch, and the novel spends one hot July week moving through its thin walled apartments: a young mother frightened of her infant's eyes, an elderly couple warring over mouse carcasses, a woman who moderates comments on an obituary website, screening the grief of strangers for profanity, and, in C4, four teenagers freshly aged out of the foster system.
Three of them are boys orbiting the fourth: Blandine Watkins, eighteen, self educated out of the town library, luminous and strange, obsessed with the female mystics, Hildegard, the anchoresses, women who exited their bodies toward God, which is what Blandine, exited from childhood by the state and by her music teacher, whose seduction the novel deals out with cold precision, wants: out of her body, out of the machinery of harm. Her sabotage campaign against the developers' valley plan, voodoo dolls, dirt and animal bones raining on the investors' dinner, collides with the household's curdling masculinity, and the novel opens with its ending, Blandine stabbed in her apartment, before circling back to assemble how, and how nearly otherwise.
Around three hundred and forty pages, formally restless, obituary pages and exit interviews included.
Best for readers who want the Rust Belt novel conducted at fever pitch, mysticism and municipal decline in the same breath.
Historical Context & Significance
The Rabbit Hutch won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2022, a debut winning the year's biggest prize, and added the inaugural Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize; Tess Gunty became the face of a cohort of young formalists the industry had been waiting to canonize.
Vacca Vale is South Bend, Indiana, barely disguised: Gunty grew up there, and the Zorn works stand in for Studebaker, whose 1963 closure began the real city's long unravelling. She has been direct about the design, wanting the structural neglect of the American interior rendered at the scale where policy becomes biography, an ambition reviewers connected back through the industrial novel to its nineteenth century roots, executed in a fragmented, extremely online idiom that is entirely her generation's.
The mystic thread carries her Notre Dame Catholic formation, put to secular use. Television rights sold with dispatch, and the book settled quickly onto the decade's debut of the decade shortlists, the prize having done exactly what prizes are for.