Our Take
Tess Gunty's debut announced a formidable new voice in American fiction, and it's easy to see why it won the National Book Award. The novel's structure, a mosaic of perspectives orbiting a decaying apartment complex called La Lapiniere Affordable Housing Complex, nicknamed the Rabbit Hutch, lets Gunty move fluidly between dark comedy and genuine pathos without ever losing her grip on the emotional core: eighteen year old Blandine Watkins, a former foster kid obsessed with medieval mystics, who is searching for some kind of transcendence in a town that offers little of it. Readers who loved the structural daring of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan or the small town social panorama of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout will find familiar pleasures here, though Gunty's voice is distinctly her own: sharp, funny, unafraid of strangeness. There are echoes too of Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng in the way domestic unease ripples outward into a whole community. This is a book for readers who like their literary fiction a little odd, a little sad, and genuinely surprising. If you want tidy resolution, look elsewhere. If you want a writer willing to take real risks with voice and form while still landing an emotional gut punch, The Rabbit Hutch delivers.
