Tess Gunty

...he tries to compute why he finds one person's distance alluring while he finds his wife's distance funereal. The faucet pummels water in the tub; he listens to his wife pull the metal valve and wonders how much water is lost as it is rerouted between the faucet and the showered. James never lost interest in his wife, even after the color drained from her hair and her laugh, but she lost interest in him...

Tess Gunty's debut novel is certainly the literary book-of-the-moment, winning the show more National Book Award and laudatory reviews everywhere. Set largely in a decaying low-income apartment building in the fictional Indiana city of Vacca Vale, the novel follows a few residents and others, but focuses on Blandine, a teenager who shares an apartment with three boys, all of whom are, like her, graduates from the foster system. Blandine is brilliant and oddly charismatic and beautiful in an off-beat way. She loves mystics, especially medieval women, and likes to rant in what sounds like lengthy twitter threads. Everyone is drawn to her, from her high school drama teacher to the three boys who live in the same apartment, to a middle-aged woman who speaks to her once. Gunty has a writing style that sometimes feels over-written and witty for the sake of being witty, but which flows nicely and she does have an eye for the interesting detail.

I struggled with this novel, I really did. I loved the sections that weren't about or told from the perspective of Blandine, which is to say, there were a handful of chapters I enjoyed. But Blandine is the focus of the novel and of the people in this novel. She's beautiful and brilliant, and quirky and unique, and everyone thinks about her all the time. I like novels with unlikeable protagonists and I like books with likable main characters, but here is an unlikeable character whom everyone genuflects to and thinks about all the time. Random people notice how beautiful she is as she passes them on the street. I was bored with her and a little baffled that being told over and over that this character is fascinating is enough for many readers to decide that yes, she is. Anyway, greater minds than mine loved this book. show less

If you don’t sell them as pets, you got to get rid of them as meat … If you don’t have 10 separate cages for them, then they start fighting. Then the males castrate the other males … They chew their balls right off.”
The Rabbit Hutch
This was an excellent read. Tess Gurdy, at 30 won the National Book Award for this novel of vignettes depicting the lives of those living in a rundown apartment building --and yes it's called The Rabbit Hutch--in a run down Indiana town. The book is show more peppered with sentences that insist on being highlighted. And I did. In C4 is a brilliant 18 year old who according to the first line is exiting her body. Below her in C2 is a 40 year old who hears her screams, as does the 70 year old man above her as he shuffles down the stairs to leave a note and a dead mouse on another neighbor's door. There's a new mother in C10 who is afraid to tell her husband that she is afraid of her child's eyes; she won't look at them. The one outsider is a man named Moses who likes to spread glow stick gel over his body and scare his enemies in the middle of the night.
Gurdy grew up in Indiana and uses the backdrop of Vacca Vale as a model for South Bend, a town that also suffered from the closing of a once famous auto industry, the Studebaker. "the Rabbit Hutch itself, the apartment block where Blandine lives, a rust-belt relic of a place that, having outlived its usefulness to the motor industry, has been left to decay. Nothing but a scattering of incongruously grand buildings and a poisoned water table remain as testimony to the glory days of the Zorn automobile company. "(The Guardian)
The character sketches are brilliant and the evolving plot makes for a compulsive read. I always love the interconnectedness of multiple characters coming together, ( i.e.Egan's Goon Squad, Orange's There,There, and McCann's Let the Great World Spin). Gurdy manages to do that as well. Highly recommend and look forward to her future work.

Lines:

Kara had a taste for neon clothing, cinnamon gum, and anguished men.

New mother: "Her breasts are swollen to celebrity
size, there are bolts of electricity zapping the powerlines of her brain, and without any assistance from coffee, her body has awakened itself to the pitch of animal vigilance. The hormones have turned the volume of the world all the way up, angling her ears babyward, forcing her to listen—always listen—for his new and spitty voice. She feels like a fox. Like a fox on Adderall"

The woman’s hair is the color of mouse fur, her bangs are cut short, and
she is wearing woolly knitted clothes despite the heat. Forty-something. She has the posture of a question mark, a stock face and a pair of 19th-century eyeglasses. Her solitude is as prominent as the cross around her neck.”

With his smile, and those jeans, it’s evident to Blandine that
no one has ever truly criticized this young man to his face, and that he’s a product of extreme parental love.

Shortly after the exchange, another man arrives, bell chinking behind him. Bound in a dark leather jacket, the odor of cigarettes, and a fresh tan, his presence exerts its own gravity. He’d be well suited for a men’s deodorant commercial, Blandine thinks: handsome enough to serve as a vessel for positive self-projection, but not so handsome as to threaten the consumer’s personal sense of masculinity. Blandine senses that he has many tattoos, although she can’t see them. He wears his testosterone like a strong cologne

Her fellow students live in the suburbs
and spend their lunches complaining about the cruises that their mothers foist upon them. They exchange How My Parents Surprised Me with My First Brand-New Car stories and wear coats from luxury outdoor brands, as though driving to high school is an extreme sport

Speaking of scandals, did you hear that Kayla gave three lacrosse guys pterodactyl? Oh my God, you haven’t heard of this? It’s three guys, one girl. The guys stand side by side, in a row. She blows the guy in the middle, then gives the other two hand jobs. So it looks like she’s trying to fly.

It’s designed to addict you, to prey on your insecurities and use them to make you stay. It exploits everybody’s loneliness and promises us community, approval, friendship. Honestly, in that sense, social media is a lot like the Church of Scientology. Or QAnon. Or Charles Manson. And then on top of that—weaponizing a person’s isolation isolation—it convinces every user that she is a minor celebrity, forcing her to curate some sparkly and artificial sampling of her best experiences, demanding a nonstop social performance that has little in
common with her inner life, intensifying her narcissism, multiplying her anxieties, narrowing her worldview. All while commodifying her, harvesting her data, and selling it to nefarious corporations so that they can peddle more shit that promises to make her prettier, smarter, more productive, more successful, more beloved.

Throughout the visit, his sister arranged her clothes, voice, and posture to communicate superiority, so proud of herself for leaving their town, as though it were a maximum-security prison. As though it took more than a plane ticket, a cosmetology degree, and a dainty face for her to find another life. show less

(60) "Weird, but good." This was the advice from a colleague who gave me this as an unsolicited lend, and in fact -- I agree completely. A brilliant teenager ages out of the foster care system by dropping out of a prestigious Catholic high school in suburban Indiana after a devastating affair with a teacher. She latches onto bizarre causes as a lifeline, such as environmental advocacy against a development planned in her (crappy) city, and the lives of young Catholic female martyrs such as show more St. Hildegard. I noticed the author went to Notre Dame and this does not go unnoticed. A liberal mind with a Catholic upbringing resonates with this reader and this drew me in to the book.

This young girl, self christened, Blandine, (after some martyr or other) lives in a housing complex with thin walls and many other humans living lives of quiet desperation. Readers are privy to the lives of the other complex dwellers. Sometimes via quick blurbs featuring just their apartment number - for example "3C: So and so gazed down at their newborn baby with fear, etc., etc...." And sometimes we were in the inhabitants of these apartments minds and lives, even if they intertwined loosely or not at all with the protagonist, Blandine. The old couple who both hated and loved one other was particularly effective. The climactic scene is biblical, and oh-so-bizarre. At one point the scene was narrated via one of the weird minor characters strange comic art.

Really? Normally, I would hate this postmodernist schtick. At one point, BTW, there is even a shout out to 'WTF is postmodernist anyway? Nevertheless, I enjoyed this. It harkened back to the literary lesson I learned from one of my favorite books of all time, Stegner's 'Angle of Repose.' This idea that we are all just where we landed trying to do the best job we can and just barely keeping our heads above water, regardless of our personal circumstances. Amen.

Maybe I underrated this book. But there were detractions, such as plot points that were too random or seemed too contrived. For example, all the excerpts from Hildegard's books. It didn't seem like Blandine was the type of smart young girl who would actually buy that hyper-religiosity. And then - I got confused - who was this Elsie person with the sloth obituary? Versus "Pinky" the guy that was doing the re-development? Versus the weird guy (the son of Elsie) who rubbed himself with glow-sticks? The author spiraled off one too many times for me to keep track of there. But that might just be a 'me' problem.

But the BEST thing about this book was that someone actually drew attention to the phenomenon that I thought only I experienced!! That tingly sensation that one may experience when someone is giving you close personal attention. For me, it typically has to be attention from a little child (?). And it does involve whispering or when the attention-giver seems to be totally concentrating on the task at hand.

WEIRD, BUT GOOD. Indeed. show less

In The Rabbit Hutch, we meet Tiffany Watkins, a preternaturally smart and intuitive teenage girl living in Vacca Vale, a decaying industrial town in present-day northwest Indiana. She appears to have a lot going for her—including a coveted scholarship to the only private school in town—but, as the product of a broken home and several stops in the foster care system, she is lonely and isolated. When an illicit relationship with the one person who seems to understand her goes awry, Tiffany show more is so distraught that she quits school, takes a menial job, changes her name to Blandine after a martyred second-century French saint, and moves into a squalid apartment complex with Jack, Malik, and Todd, three other young people also longing to escape their foster lives.

The apartment building, named La Lapinière back in its elegant heyday but now dubbed “The Rabbit Hutch” for its rundown status, houses an eclectic assortment of troubled people who share their bad luck or their bad life decisions. As we are introduced to the residents—including a young mother afraid to look into her newborn’s eyes, a middle-aged woman whose life involves editing online obituaries, and an older couple unhappily married for many years—it becomes clear that loneliness is another thing they have in common. The action in the book involves two threads: Moses, the estranged son of a recently deceased actress, is offended by edits to his comments on his mother’s obituary and seeks revenge; and the three roommates fall in love with Blandine and try to impress her with the ritualistic killing of small animals. While these storylines do come together in the end, it is not giving away much to say that things do not end well.

I am really torn as to how to evaluate this novel. Overall, I did enjoy reading it, mostly because of the often-exquisite phrasing and language that first-time author Tess Gunty uses in telling the tale. Simply put, this is a beautifully written story that takes the reader between past and present events and from third-person to first-person narration in such a seamless manner that everything makes sense. Although the backstories of several of the supporting characters—most notably the roommates, unfortunately—are underdeveloped, we do get to understand very well what drives Blandine. On the other hand, not every detail in the tale makes total sense (Blandine’s whole Marxist relationship rant near the end, for instance) and the book does drag along to what becomes a very terse conclusion. So, although The Rabbit Hutch is a novel to recommend for the writing alone, it is a recommendation that comes with some qualifications. show less