The Rabbit Hutch

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

“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

“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

• “Tess Gunty is a masterful talent with a remarkable eye for the poetic, the poignant, and the absurdly sublime. The Rabbit Hutch unspools the story of Blandine Watkins and other inhabitants of a rundown building on the edge of the once bustling Vacca Vale, Indiana. A brutal and beautiful novel that both delights and devastates with its unflinching depiction of Rust Belt decline, Gunty’s debut is a tour de force that’s sure to top this year’s best-of lists.”—Lauren Wilkinson, author of American Spy**

  “Now and then a novel comes along that offers its darkness in an outstretched palm demanding nothing in return. Ignore its inquisition at your own peril. The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty introduces a new bearing on how the narratives of today present. There’s fearlessness apparent in the ample ways the dynamics of family, community, and a bold heart reobliges us to reacquaint ourselves with what the recurrent tangle of youth and power always demands: how to acknowledge? how to do better? As a testament to this book’s generosity, the music of George Saunders, Dorothy Parker, David Foster Wallace, maybe Rachel Cusk, Lionel Shriver, not to mention a parade of Post-Modernists and Modernists emerge in the early pages before they are just as effortlessly devoured by shadows fast exceeding questions of style, subject and even voice, fast exceeding that outstretched hand. And why not? — given that The Rabbit Hutch, among other things, is packed with mythology, Christian mysticism, Marxian readings of doubtful relationships, the flaneur’s search for apotheosis in the fragile, the chemical components of glow sticks, crab migrations. (There’s even a Paul Thomas Anderson movie in there which readers with an ear for soundtracks can easily imagine in the warm grain of ratcheting film frames.) Most importantly, though, the darkness Gunty finally conjures exceeds all territories of origin as well as questions of form, representation and repetition (what Harold Bloom called belatedness) in order to meet the only light worthy of such an enormous act of creation. 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

  Autorentext
  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.

  Klappentext

  "A debut novel about an odd assortment of residents living in a crumbling apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest"--

  Zusammenfassung
  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

  Leseprobe
  Chapter 1

  The Opposite of Nothing

  On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only eighteen years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen. The agony is sweet, as the mystics promised. It’s like your soul is being stabbed with light, the mystics said, and they were right about that, too. The mystics call this experience the Transverberation of the Heart, or the Seraph’s Assault, but no angel appears to Blandine. There is, however, a bioluminescent man in his fifties, glowing like a firefly. He runs to her and yells.

  Knife, cotton, hoof, bleach, pain, fur, bliss—as Blandine exits herself, she is all of it. She is every tenant of her apartment building. She is trash and cherub, a rubber shoe on the seafloor, her father’s orange jumpsuit, a brush raking through her mother’s hair. The first and last Zorn Automobile factory in Vacca Vale, Indiana. A nucleus inside the man who robbed her body when she was fourteen, a pair of r…