The Rabbit Hutch
By Tess Gunty
Knopf, 2022

You have that stack of unread books at home, but you keep seeing in the bookstores Tess Gunty’s novel The Rabbit Hutch with that little sticker “National Book Award Winner 2022.” Should you add it to your stack? If you’re a talent scout, a reader tolerant of first-novelist overreach if she displays marvelous sentence-making talent along with a documentarian’s eye for American culture right now—then the answer is probably “yes.”

Since serving as an NBA judge in 2005, I’ve been reviewing the winners, some of whom have been quite young or early in their careers: Phil Klay, Susan Choi, Charles Yu. Tess Gunty is thirty, The Rabbit Hutch is her debut, and her work is superior to that of these recent winners. Gunty’s book brims with the kind of prodigy promise I associate with Richard Powers and his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance—not an award winner but a harbinger of greatness published when he was 28.

But you will need to be patient with Gunty: her protagonist Tiffany is an 18-year-old high school dropout obsessed with a medieval female mystics, is capable of winning an argument about late capitalist sexuality with her former drama teacher (and former one-night stand), and is an earnest and snarky eco-prankster. Which is to say that Blandine, the name of a martyred saint that Tiffany gives herself, is less a believable character than a mouthpiece for Gunty’s sentences.

You will also have to be patient with Gunty’s formal acrobatics. She opens with brief passages about multiple characters who live in the Rabbit Hutch, their name for a low-rent apartment building. Some of these characters have a role in the plot revolving elliptically around Blandine, and some are present for, I suppose, realistic ballast, contrast with later characters even more eccentric than Blandine, including a hateful old-time television star and the adult son who despises her. Point of view shifts, short and long chapters alternate. The novel includes a news report, an obituary, comments in a funeral guest book, quotes from Saint Hildegard of Bingen, a long letter to a therapist. And, as if words were not enough, Gunty inserts fourteen pages of sketches near the novel’s end, abstract visuals that indirectly depict the novel’s violent climax that Gunty “announces” at the very beginning of the story that takes place during the few days before Blandine “exits her body.”

Gunty grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and the Vacca Vale of the novel (valley of excrement, at least in one Indian language) appears to be loosely based on her hometown. Vacca Vale once depended on the Zorn auto factory, but when it closed rust set in and now the local government wants to turn a park into a little Silicon Valley, a plan that the idealistic Blandine fights against when she is not at odds with her three male roommates, all of whom, along with Blandine, have aged out of foster families. The teenage boys are largely crude or stupid or both. Blandine’s teacher and brief lover is sensitive and smart, but still a target of her feminist wrath. If you are a male reader, you may be impatient with how Gunty stacks the gender deck. But—no spoiler—the strangest male in the novel, a literal wild-card joker, turns out to be Blandine’s savior.

If your patience has not been worn out by Gunty and me, we now get to the good stuff. The following passage represents one stylistic feature of The Rabbit Hutch--the lengthy inventive rant. Blandine is arguing with a roommate who is transfixed by social media:

Everybody influencing, everybody under the influence, everybody staring at their own godforsaken profile, searching for proof that they’re lovable. And then, once you’re nice and distracted by the hard work of tallying up your failures and comparing them to other people’s triumphs, that’s when the algorithmic predators of late capitalism can pounce, enticing you to partake in consumeristic, financially irresponsible forms of so-called self-care, which is really just advanced selfishness. Facials! Pedicures! Smoothie packs delivered to your door!

Along with rants such as this are short passages in which Gunty characterizes a person with a list of unusually precise likes and dislikes. An expansion of this strategy is about the actress:

She liked private compartments on trains, men in their fifties, iconoclasm. She liked fucked-up pigeon feet: she liked to point them out to her companions; she liked reading explanations of the phenomenon; she liked that, no matter where in the world you went, you could count of seeing fucked-up pigeon feet there. She liked endangered creatures. Smoked meat. To leave the lights on in her house, to drive with the roof down even when it was cold….

Gunty allows characters other than Blandine to speak, and has no fear of composing extended dialogues that would be edited out of more conventional novels. The son of the television star skips her funeral and instead travels to Vacca Vale on a petty revenge mission. While killing time in a church, he is invited into the confessional by a priest. Twenty pages follow, a twisty conversation about the abandonment of the young by the old, a central theme of Zornless Vacca Vale and The Rabbit Hutch. If you are a matriarch or patriarch or property developer, you may be impatient with this too, at least until the end when adults enter the room and show some courage.

Some years ago I published an essay entitled “In Praise of Bullshitting” that celebrated older contemporary male authors (such as David Foster Wallace and William Vollmann) who treated the novel as a place where original, often vernacular language could occur in digressions or monologues, providing what Roland Barthes called “the pleasure of the text.” In this century, the American novel—desperately searching for readers with other entertainment options—has become more functional and straightforward, character-driven linear plots told in an unobtrusive style, stories ready for film or prestige television. Gunty is a bullshitter, for me a positive term that means continual, even compulsive attention to linguistic texture, to local effects word to word, sentence to sentence.

At times, I think of Gunty’s bullshitting as influenced by the very social media she attacks: constant novelty, hyper-oddity, fragmentary flashes as a response to fear of losing the clicking audience. But mostly I think her intensive and various styles are in service of cultural critique, perhaps using the forms of popular media against itself--and for us. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” Wittgenstein said. I believe Gunty believes that—at least for the world of fiction—and that belief is the source of her talent. If this prodigy becomes another Richard Powers, you won’t want to have missed out on her first book. Even if The Rabbit Hutch doesn’t give you consistent pleasure, I believe you will be glad you both put up with and enjoyed the novel’s youthful excesses.

Tom LeClair is the author of, most recently, Passing Again, a novel in Gunty’s patchwork mode.