Tess and Me

I saw a photo of what I thought was a Hollywood starlet, but the caption informed me that it was the thirty-year-old author who had won the 2022 National Book Award for her debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch.

Of course, as a writer, I was interested. What did she have going for her (besides beauty and youth)?

Miss Gunty (I assume she’s not married) graduated from Notre Dame with a major in English. While there she involved herself in all manner of extracurricular literary activities. She moved on to the MFA program at New York University. Again, she was an active presence, which continued after graduation. To cite one example: she worked alongside her former professor, Jonathan Safran Foer, providing research and writing for his book on climate change.

In her Acknowledgment pages she expresses gratitude to the many who helped her in the writing of Hutch. The first cited is her agent and the second is her editor at Knopf.

She made all the right career moves (primarily the MFA at NYU). She networked, establishing contacts with important people. I have no doubt her social skills are excellent, and her presence at a Manhattan party would be welcome.

But, though those things play a part in success, her novel is what counts.

I got The Rabbit Hutch from the library.

First off, I have to admit that I’m jealous of her. Not for the trappings of fame; social activities are anathema to me. Nor the accolades, the award. I only wanted readers. Not best seller status; a modest few who would enter the world I worked so hard to create would satisfy me. I didn’t get that.

So it’s fair to ask: can I give her book an unbiased reading?

I believe that I can. Tess could knock that chip off my shoulder with her writing. She could make me a believer in her talent. Others who achieved success have done that, she could too. But I wasn’t committed to read the entire novel (after all, how much time would her agent and editor devote to an unsolicited manuscript from someone with no contacts or credentials?). The opening dozen or so pages would be enough to determine whether or not I would continue. The National Book Award and the blurbs on the back cover didn’t matter to me. Those blurbs were all by fellow writers, including Foer, and they lavish praise on her; but this is part of the game of “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” (Foer, by the way, goes way overboard, calling the novel “profoundly wise, wildly inventive, deeply moving.” Wasn’t he aware that adjectives shouldn’t be overused?)

Last note before entering those opening pages. The novel, according to reviews, is about the dysfunctional lives of people in a run-down apartment building in a dying city. There’s an old adage: “Write what you know.” I consider this to be cautionary; writers have imaginations, they can extend their scope beyond personal experiences. But it’s not easy to do with authenticity. At the end of Gunty’s Acknowledgments pages she writes “I am indescribably grateful to my parents and brothers . . .” There’s every indication that she was brought up in a happy family — and a fairly affluent one. So why write about squalor, about people who are down and out? Just wondering.

The Rabbit Hutch — good title.

Opening sentence: “On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body.”

Also good. The reader wants to know what’s happening. But as I read on in the first paragraph, what I got was a lot about mystical matters (Transverberation of the Heart, etc.). At the end of this paragraph a “bioluminescent man in his fifties, glowing like a firefly,” runs to her and yells.

Who — or what — is this man? Now I’m baffled, and a bit annoyed.

The next paragraph begins with: “Knife, cotton, hoof, bleach, pain, fur, bliss — as Blandine exits herself she is all of it. She is . . . ” And in this second — and long — paragraph we get all the things she is, including a rubber shoe on the seafloor, an algorithm for amplified content, a blue slushee from the gas station. Some of what she is has to do with her life (Katy the Portuguese water dog who licked her face) or what is happening to her (she’s the smartphone that films her as she bleeds on the floorboards of her apartment). Then comes the disclosure: “she is the gavel that will sentence the boys to prison for what they’re doing to her right now.”

It’s a gang rape. But I have crucial doubts regarding the many things that Blandine is. In what sense is she a blue slushee — and all the rest? I can’t believe that this is what would be going on in her mind. What we’re getting in this outpouring of words is Tess Gunty strutting her creative stuff. What’s on display is the writer’s talent: her inventiveness, her use of imagery. It’s not about Blandine at all. It does serve as a setup for the last (impressive) sentences in this section: Blandine “is not everything. Not exactly. She’s just the opposite of everything.”

The next section takes place in C12. It’s a down-to-earth description of a man in his sixties, a former logger, who’s lying in bed looking at an app called Rate Your Date (Mature Users!). He’s getting low rates (the last cited, from DeniseDaBeast, describes him as a tator tot and gives him one star). Would an elderly former logger subject himself to online dating? Would he not have sense enough to know that world is not one he belongs in? Again — I felt this section was false in its depiction of a character.

C10. A teenager seems to be priming himself for a photo session over the internet. What he’ll display is not revealed.

C8 (how many apartments are we going to visit?). A mother is nursing her baby, but (as we soon find out) she’s having major problems bonding with him. She checks her phone; there’s something from her mother, who has remarried; it has a photo which is described at length (it’s of a biker named Daisy the bearded dragon, who, among other oddities, has a dinosaur eye). Then we get the text, which begins: “U got ur baby, I got mine!!” This text goes on, with a lot of emogis. Next the nursing mother goes to three social media platforms, while “cherishing the tiny sounds of contentment” from her child. But she refuses to look at him; she fears her baby’s eyes. Actually, despite that word “contentment,” she’s not doing at all well with this whole motherhood business. The section goes on for six more pages filled with anxiety, agitation and emotional turmoil. Her husband arrives home and is supportive, though he doesn’t seem to understand the depths of her despair.

. At our next stop, C6, an elderly couple are watching the TV news. This gives Gunty an opportunity for a detour into the mess rampant in the world (ISIS violence, contaminated groundwater, a celebrity baby born with werewolf syndrome, etc.). It also contains a long paragraph in which a thirteen-year-old girl explains autonomous sensory median response. But the wife wants her husband to pay attention to her. It seems an upstairs neighbor (the “newlyweds with the baby”) are dropping dead mice onto their balcony, and she wants her husband to do something about it. She has a “right to a balcony without any dead corpses on it!”

We take a brief return to C4, where Blandine was gang raped, and get more impressionistic imagery. (A goat is involved, which was missing in the scene that opened the novel.)

End of Part I (page 17).

What do I think of this? I’m a bit queasy. A bit repelled. Gunty’s subject matter is so unrelentingly ugly! A gang rape, an elderly man getting online abuse, a woman who fears her baby’s eyes. Dead mice. It’s just too much.

Tess Gunty is a maximalist writer. She has a fertile imagination, and allows it free rein. When, in my description of the plot, I use words like “long” and “at length,” I mean it. If she can express the same thing in four different ways, she gives us all four. She takes detours. She throws a variety of disconnected ingredients into the pot. This is a form of talent some will appreciate. It ranks low on my list of virtues.

Maybe what I’ve described is inviting to you. Maybe you perceive a higher purpose to what Gunty is serving up (I’m sure redemption will eventually enter the picture). But — and this is crucial — in these pages I could not relate to, nor believe in, Blandine or the mother. (The others are not developed.) Enough words have been written over enough pages to establish real people; many authors do it in one paragraph. All Gunty has provided, so far, is lurid sensationalism, dollied up with high-end literary prose.

On page 17 I was done with The Rabbit Hutch.