{"id":9856,"date":"2023-03-24T17:48:11","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T21:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9856"},"modified":"2023-03-24T17:48:11","modified_gmt":"2023-03-24T21:48:11","slug":"the-rabbit-hutch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/24\/the-rabbit-hutch\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rabbit Hutch."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Tess Gunty won the National Book Award in 2022 for her debut novel The Rabbit Hutch<\/em>, the title of which refers to a low-income housing complex in a declining Rust Belt town called Vacca Vale that is home to a broad cast of peculiar characters. It\u2019s a compelling read and the prose is lovely, although the stories of the various characters don\u2019t tie together that well, giving the book the feel of a series of nested short stories rather than a single, coherent work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most prominent characters in The Rabbit Hutch<\/a> <\/em>are the four young adults who have just recently left the town\u2019s foster-care system, including 18-year-old Blandine Watkins, the star of the show in more ways than one. She\u2019s beautiful and eccentric, unknowable in many ways, bewitching at least one of her three male roommates (Malik), delving into all sorts of mysticism and woo while redefining who she is as she enters adulthood. Those three roommates are all just a little further into their majority, none of them doing very well at adulting, which is why, we\u2019re led to believe, they so easily fall into a bizarre pattern of ritual violence against animals. Gunty also gives us an extended flashback to a former student at the local high school, Tiffany, who becomes the subject of the school\u2019s 42-year-old music teacher\u2019s advances and eventually his victim as well; and a long digression about Elsie, who was once the child star of a TV sitcom called Meet the Neighbors<\/em> that\u2019s beloved by one of the Hutch\u2019s residents, and whose son, it turns out, hated her guts and is completely out of his mind. He doesn\u2019t even live in Vacca Vale, and the thickness of the thread that brings him there by the end of the novel could be measured in nanometers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a disjointed novel, but Gunty has a real knack for crafting characters and describing her settings so that the reader observes from both the bird\u2019s-eye view and from up close, putting you right there in the action through her use of both detail and metaphor. She refers to a dowdy 40-year-old woman named Joan who moderates the forums on an obituaries web site as having \u201cthe posture of a question mark (and) a stock face,\u201d which only underscores the woman\u2019s insignificance in the town and to some degree in her own life. She speaks of an older man failing on dating apps as hating women \u201can anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument.\u201d Even when the plot was all over the place \u2013 and it was, a lot, especially when Gunty jerks us out of Vacca Vale to follow Elsie and her idiot son \u2013 the prose carried it through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel opens with a passage where Blandine \u201cexits her body,\u201d which is going to lead readers to assume she\u2019s been killed and they\u2019ll have to wait the whole book to find out how and why. I\u2019m going to spoil this right now, because it\u2019s a dumb gimmick: She is alive at the end of the book. There\u2019s more to it than this, but I can\u2019t tell you how irritated I was even when I figured out before the midpoint that this was a scam \u2013 and it\u2019s just not necessary. The progression of the story around these characters, and the way Gunty brings together the various subplots, is more than enough to sustain the narrative greed here. The strong implication that Blandine is dead, boosted by some other hints throughout the novel, only to reveal at the end that she\u2019s not is cheap and unworthy of the rest of the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

The Rabbit Hutch<\/em> follows in the Richard Russo<\/a> tradition of profiling dying industrial towns through their residents, here with less humor but with far better-written women than Russo ever provided. It also reminded me of J. K. Rowling\u2019s poorly-received novel The Casual Vacancy<\/a><\/em>, her first novel for adults and one that received a lot of criticism because it wasn\u2019t Harry Potter. That book was set in a fictional town in southwest England that also seemed a bit down on its luck and followed a very broad, and in that case more diverse, cast of residents in the wake of the death of a parish councillor, working in themes of income inequality, racial injustice, drug policy, and more. I liked that book more than critics did as a whole, and think it\u2019s a fair comparison here, with a more ambitious plot but inferior prose to Gunty\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t speak to the National Book Award for last year, as I haven\u2019t read any of the five other finalists, but The Rabbit Hutch <\/em>feels much more to me like a promising rookie season that points to superstar potential than a \u201cbest of the year\u201d sort of work. I enjoyed it, I loved the prose, I thought some of the subplots worked but as many didn\u2019t, and there was too much manipulation of the reader\u2019s interest for a novel this serious. I hope and expect that her next work will play more to her strengths, and dispense with the stunt writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Percival Everett\u2019s The Trees<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tess Gunty won the National Book Award in 2022 for her debut novel The Rabbit Hutch, the title of which refers to a low-income housing complex in a declining Rust Belt town called Vacca Vale that is home to a broad cast of peculiar characters. It\u2019s a compelling read and the prose is lovely, although […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1343,36,684,430,816],"class_list":["post-9856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2022-novels","tag-american-literature","tag-contemporary-novels","tag-debut-novels","tag-national-book-award","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9856"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9857,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9856\/revisions\/9857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}