It is impossible to isolate a single element that makes Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch so amazing; it is a virtuoso performance, a stunning debut that runs like clockwork, meticulously planned and reasoned, and simultaneously so smooth and compelling that one flies through its 400-odd pages. It is a novel about lonely people; it is a novel about outcasts; it is a novel about a dying city; it is a novel about wanting to transcend all of these things. It is funny, it is devastating, it is beautiful.

The novel is set over only three days in July in the fictional city of Vacca Vale, Indiana: a wasteland, willed into existence by a now-defunct automobile manufacturer and its empty factories that still blight the landscape. It is one of America’s top ten dying cities; it is prone to flooding; it is a place as real as any I have been. The titular Rabbit Hutch is La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex, an apartment building where most of the characters reside.

“I think we should all take each other a little more seriously,” Blandine Watkins, the novel’s protagonist, says. She is speaking to a neighbor she has just met for the first time, in the laundromat, after assaulting her with apocryphal stories about young mystics who sweat blood and claimed to be engaged to Jesus Christ. Blandine is a force: eighteen years old, bleached-white hair and more intelligence than she knows what to do with, fresh out of the foster care system and living with three boys a year older than she is. She dreams of revolution, she reads Hildegard von Bingen, she makes voodoo dolls. She longs to escape from her body because of the way it has been treated, because of the things she has been subjected to because of it; the idea of finding pleasure in the body is foreign and unattainable to her, sometimes dangled over her like a carrot only to be snatched away.

Other central characters are Joan Kowalski, forty years old, alone, and moderating online comments for obituaries; Blandine’s roommates, Jack, Malik, and Todd, simmering with testosterone and adrenaline; and a visitor to the city, Moses Robert Blitz: the eccentric son of a recently-deceased actress, now in his fifties and jaded by Hollywood and his late mother’s extravagance.

The personality of her characters is vibrant and seems to radiate from the page; better yet, because of the shifting perspective, every major character is examined from multiple angles. Blandine finds herself repulsive; every other character finds her otherworldly and beautiful. This is a novel about damaged people, alienated people, people who do not trust easily, and it presents them with empathy. It is a wild creature, jagged and sometimes ferocious—filled with conviction and unquestionably capable of standing on its own—but at its heart is a deeply-felt tenderness.

How is it possible for us to become so alienated from people so physically close to us, the novel asks? Blandine is palpably isolated; her relationship with her roommates is dysfunctional at best, and she has no close friends. She hardly knows any of her neighbors. It’s a testament to Gunty’s ability that a novel about so many unhappy characters doesn’t read as bleak; even though every one of the main characters is lonely, the brief connections between them are so rich and full of life. The revelations happen in those intersections. The novel is brimming with the lifeblood of the everyday, alive with the frustrations and the exaltations of it; maybe more than any other book I have read, every single point of contact between two people has some kind of meaning.

Recently I had the pleasure of taking a seminar on style—what it is, how to talk about it, how to improve it—with Garth Greenwell, one of my heroes. When analyzing the style of another writer or our own, he asked us to reflect on its limits. What forms does this prose accommodate—essays, sermons, book reviews, manifestos, philosophical tangents? What languages, or dialects, are allowed to speak in the work—the voice of a parent talking to a child, the voice of academic discipline, the voice of religious devotion? It’s hard to imagine language Gunty couldn’t adopt. She casts a wide net, switching between viewpoints easily, from character to newspaper article to the aforementioned online comments sections and so on; it’s a display of her flexibility, both in prose and in form.

Much of the novel is locally non-chronological (though the overarching structure is chronological and linear), and there is a breadth of perspective. In this sense it’s reminiscent of the polyphony in novels like Jennifer Egan’s Welcome to the Goon Squad or The Candy House—where it can at times feel superfluous—but here, the multiplicity of voices is tightly spun and carefully controlled, structurally effective to the extreme. In a passage that is mind-boggling in its competence, the narrative is presented as overheard gossip interwoven with standardized test questions, the two dancing around each other and interacting in brilliant ways; there is one brief section that might be categorized as a kind of abstract graphic novel. The form is perfect for the story being told: it is controlled chaos, a portrait that emerges, gradually and beautifully, from the overlapping trajectories of so many lives. However disparate, everything inevitably fits in this book, somehow so dense it should be bursting and yet so well-contained.

Some of the most touching scenes take place in the storm’s eye; notable is “The Flood,” a chapter at the center of the book that recounts a young married couple’s blissful stasis, their overnight stay in a motel. The way Gunty writes about sex is gorgeous and erotic, full of heart and feeling and beautiful language. After they sleep together, the woman muses: “It was the familiarity of conjugal sex that moved [her]. To her, it proved that the ordinary could transform you, too.”

The style is nothing short of miraculous: in her writing, the ravings of internet trolls are voiced with as much conviction as typo-strewn messages from well-meaning relatives. A teenager’s analogy between capitalism and an exploitative relationship is not only welcome but triumphant. One of the novel’s greatest achievements, the chapter “Variables,” is an account of what a high-school student first thinks of as an affair, but what is really her exploitation; it was originally a short story Gunty published in The Iowa Review. The details have been significantly changed, and it has been greatly expanded and improved. Reading it, one feels the omniscient third-person narrative voice as a presence of its own: so clever with its repetition and wry commentary that it’s dizzying. I am reminded of something Roxane Gay said in her review of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot: “Man, this is a writer just showing off just how well she can write.”

The key to it all is how effortless it feels. There is no struggle to tie everything together. The writing is confident, assured, whatever you want to call it: it invites you inside and then grips you, dares you to go along with it.

The Rabbit Hutch asks us to break out of our solitude: to reach across the gap. To be transformed by the ordinary. To take each other just a little bit more seriously.

I think the cover art is the best thing abt this debut. I was intrigued by the pre use and the first few chapters drew me in but it just got a bit too weird for my taste. I thought the rotation of characters in the soy complex was cool and I do badly wanted to follow along but I stead u got lost.

"Sometimes, Moses Robert Blitz... paints his entire body with the liquid of broken glow sticks, forcibly enters the house of an enemy, and wakes the enemy. Then he flails around in the dark, naked and aglow".
Now that I have your attention, let me rave about this book. It's violent and messy and full of wisdom and scary observant. In a rundown midwest town, 4 ex-foster kids are sharing an apartment and trying to get by. This is their story, but also the story of others who live in the apartment complex and a few adjacent characters, including Mr. Blitz- who is a trip. I was never, not once bored. I had no idea where this was going and could not turn the pages fast enough to find out. Everyone in this book is sloppy, and complex. Somehow, Gunty manages to capture examples of humans at their best and also at their worst (perhaps at the same time). I highly recommend this to fans of Ottessa Moshfegh's work. Trigger warnings for animal violence and cruelty.

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty is a novel that you will enjoy if you like novels where the setting is also a character. Tess Gunty's writing is so descriptive, so alive, I felt like I was walking the streets of Vocca Vale and the abandoned Zorn factories.

A very different book for me.... I can't pinpoint exactly what it was that encouraged me to finish this book. The author lures you in with her story telling and the lives of very different characters who are linked together in interesting and, at times, tragic ways. When a book makes you think about it after you have completed it, it has done its job. Well done, Tess Gunty!

Hmmm. I wish I would've loved this more. The plot sounded so intriguing to me. "The Rabbit Hutch" deals with very sensitive subject matter, which I didn't mind but there were too many characters to keep track of. The narrative switches so abruptly that I couldn't keep all the point-of-views straight. It was very overwhelming. I decided to keep reading, and overall I was expecting more from this story. I just felt disconnected from the ending. It wasn't a bad novel and the writing was nice, but it's a mixed bag for me.

First off, the cover art for this book is amazing. Immediately made me interested! One thing that can also make or break a book is its summary, which in my opinion, fell short of when describing this novel. I realize that with such a bizarre premise, it can be difficult to write what the book is about, but I think something a little more mysterious and drawing the reader's attention to that fact that the book doesn't follow a typical narrative could have been the way to go. Let me get into the overall plot- loved it. The idea of different people living in an apartment complex in a derelict town that's about to undergo a complete gentrification is a very interesting angle. By the summary blurb, I thought this book was just going to be about the foster kids and their antics. Blandine was such a great character, and I was constantly wondering what would happen to her. The subplot with the deceased actress was great, as was her son obsessed with rubbing the glow stick substance all over himself. I would love to see a film or tv show capture this entire book! I think this novel would be great for fans of the podcast (and books series based off it) Welcome to Nightvale or even Twin Peaks. It has just the right amount of strange moments that you can appreciate it wrapped up in emotion and grit. I will be telling everyone about this one, and can't wait to read more of Tess Gunty!