In the literary fiction space, Los Angles-based writer Tess Gunty adds more richness and depth with her book The Rabbit Hutch. Gunty didn’t play safe in her debut novel set in the postindustrial city in Indiana that chronicles an online obituary writer. With her multiple characters, she touches upon pertinent themes like medieval female Catholic mystics, the socialisation of violence, mental illness, the brutalities of the extraction economy and more. And it is her risk-taking ability that made her headline literary circles as the novel not only became The Sunday Times Bestseller but went on to win many accolades including winning the National Book Award in 2022, Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, Oprah Daily Book of the Year and more. As the novel, published by Harper Collins, becomes available in India we caught up with Gunty who talked about being influenced by Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me, the multiple themes of the novel and her influences. Excerpts:
A debut book generating such rave reviews is quite amazing. How are feeling and did you expect your first book to do so well?
I’m genuinely astonished. Hard work and stamina are required to write a novel, but good fortune is required to gain any attention for it. I have been extremely lucky. Separately, this year has joyfully corrected misconceptions I had about publishing — for years before I submitted my book, I was led to believe that contemporary publishing is risk-averse and that your first novel has to “play it safe”, but I am happy to report that this is not at all the case. My own novel aside, the fiction I’ve seen celebrated this year proves that there are countless publishers and readers of literary fiction who are eager to uplift work that is unapologetically itself. The literary ecosystem is full of people who are receptive to demanding, unconventional, bold fiction. I’ve spent the past year meeting booksellers, readers, librarians, critics, fellow authors, and publishers, and what I’ve seen in the literary world is profoundly hopeful. So many people are hungry for literature that respects them, challenges them, and ignites them; fiction that honours their intellectual ferocity and imaginative strength and yearning for social justice and meets them there. I always write assuming that my reader is smarter and more interesting than I am — that I am both collaborating with and competing against a verdant inner life, and this past year has energetically affirmed that approach.
Can you explain the significance of the title of the book The Rabbit Hutch?
Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hunch
My novel is set in a fictional, postindustrial city in Indiana called Vacca Vale. Vacca Vale was once home to a thriving automobile company which shut down in the 1960s, leaving the town economically orphaned. Most of my characters live in the same affordable housing complex called La Lapinière, which is an antiquated French word that roughly translates to rabbit warren or rabbit hutch. The locals call the building the Rabbit Hutch. There are numerous rabbits throughout the book, and I was interested in the conflicting associations that many people have with them: The Easter Bunny, Donnie Darko, Playboy, the White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland. Rabbits are kept as pets but also raised for meat; in our collective subconscious, they are poised between innocence and corruption, knowledge and ignorance; this contrast is generative for me. But the title solidified for me when I watched Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me, which shares a lot of concerns with my novel: it is also set in a postindustrial Midwestern town (Flint, MI — Moore’s hometown), and exposes some of the devastation that the abrupt closure of an automobile plant inflicted on the people living there. In the documentary, Michael Moore sees a sign on the side of the road advertising rabbits for “pets or meat.” He finds a woman named Rhonda Britton who began breeding rabbits for a living after she lost her job. During their conversation, she says that you have to keep the males in separate cages, or they start fighting. You have to kill them when they get to a certain age, she says, otherwise, they’ll brutalise each other. Her quote became one of the epigraphs of my novel. To me, her observation offered a profound distillation of horizontal violence — violence aimed at an oppressor that misfires into the oppressed community. The rabbits want to kill the cage, but they can’t, so they attack each other. One of the guiding questions of my novel was: How does structural violence and neglect generate interpersonal violence and neglect? The image of rabbits trapped in a cage was arresting and revelatory, to me.
The book has multiple characters. Who was the first character who helped give birth or shape the novel?
Joan Kowalski was the first character who came to me, and she was the one who determined the psychological colour palette of the novel. She’s a single woman in her forties who moderates comments for an obituary website. She allowed me to access the purgatorial atmosphere of the town, a hinterland of indefinite waiting. The first scene I wrote now occurs towards the end of the novel; she’s giving some gifts she’s received from her aunt to a woman who lives on her block. I hold great affection for Joan, and I find that readers do, too.
The novel is set in contemporary America. Can you tell us of the themes that the book touches?
The novel is interested in loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom, the gendered management of power, the environmental crisis, the Internet, medieval female Catholic mystics, the socialisation of violence, mental illness, the brutalities of the extraction economy, and transcendence.
The story has been described as savagingly beautiful and bitingly funny. Have you used humour to lighten the narrative or is this your style?
I think humour is naturally produced when you attend to normalised absurdities, destabilise the environment, try to look the dark matter of life in the eye. Defamiliarisation is important to me; I always aim to see things anew when I write. Sometimes, altering a familiar phenomenon a few degrees produces the uncanny. Other times, it produces comedy. I like to dwell between those two forces.
Who have been your literary influences?
For this novel in particular, I was influenced by a number of polyphonic works of fiction, including the radio play Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas (during revision, I listened to a performance of the play on repeat on my walks around a reservoir near my apartment), and the collection of comics Building Stories by Chris Ware. I was also influenced by Middlemarch by George Eliot; Dubliners and Ulysses by James Joyce; A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan; iHotel by Karen Tei Yamashita; There, There by Tommy Orange; NW by Zadie Smith; Great House by Nicole Krauss; the work of Joy Williams (especially The Quick and the Dead, which was the novel that began this book); and many works by David Foster Wallace.
Poetry is the coffee I drink before I write, and some contemporary poets who influence me include Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ocean Vuong, Morgan Parker, Ariana Reines, Terrance Hayes, Natalie Diaz, Kaveh Akbar, Sharon Olds, Deborah Landau, and Tracy K Smith. Fiona Maddocks’s biography, Hildegard of Bingen: The Woman of her Age, was also illuminative. I read Knopf’s Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara out loud to myself as I was revising. Because the protagonist of my novel is fascinated by female mystics of the Catholic tradition, I read Penguin’s Selected Writings: Hildegard of Bingen, Story of a Soul by Thérèse de Lisieux,and Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, among others. I’ve loved The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot since I first encountered it at age 19; I copied it out and tacked it to my bedroom wall in Brooklyn, and there was a phase in which I read it every day before I wrote.
Any Indian writer you have read or you follow?
Yes, I love the work of Megan Fernandes, Sarah Thankam Mathews, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Salman Rushdie, to name a few.
What are you writing next?
I’m hesitant to say too much, because my work tends to change radically as I write, developing a will of its own, but I’m working on a novel that follows three characters in the aftermath of an event that binds them together.