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In her groundbreaking debut novel, “The Rabbit Hutch” (Knopf), Tess Gunty explores the lives of young adults who have aged out of the foster care system without finding a permanent family. Set in a downtrodden city inspired by Gunty’s hometown of South Bend, Indiana, the book received the prestigious National Book Award for fiction.
Read an excerpt below, and make sure to catch Robert Costa’s exclusive interview with Tess Gunty on “CBS News Sunday Morning” on August 13!
“The Rabbit Hutch” by Tess Gunty
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The Opposite of Nothing
On a scorching night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins experiences an otherworldly departure from her physical body. Despite being only eighteen years old, she has long yearned for this transformative event. The pain is strangely satisfying, just as the mystics proclaimed. It feels as if beams of light are piercing her soul—an experience known as the Transverberation of the Heart or the Seraph’s Assault, according to the mystics. However, there are no celestial beings appearing before Blandine. Instead, she encounters a bioluminescent man in his fifties, radiating with the glow of a firefly, rushing towards her, shouting.
Knife, cotton, hoof, bleach, pain, fur, bliss—Blandine encompasses it all as she transcends her individuality. She becomes every resident of her apartment building, embodying both refuse and celestial beings, a discarded shoe on the ocean floor, her father’s orange jumpsuit, a brush gliding through her mother’s hair. She personifies the first and last Zorn Automobile factory in Vacca Vale, Indiana. She exists within the core of the man who violated her when she was fourteen, wearing the red glasses that adorn her favorite librarian’s face, along with plucking a radish from a bed of soil. She is nobody. She transforms into Katy, the Portuguese water dog, who lovingly licked her face whenever their foster family cast them out into the snow for being in the way. She encompasses an algorithm for amplifying content and a blue slushee from a gas station. She signifies the initial pair of tap shoes on a child actress’s feet, as well as the man instructing her to try harder. She becomes the smartphone capturing her own bleeding figure on the apartment’s floor, as well as the chipped nail polish on the teenage worker who assembled the ninetieth step of that phone on a factory floor in Shenzhen, China. She enfolds an American satellite, a profanity, and the band encircling her high school theater director’s finger. She manifests in every cottontail rabbit grazing on the vegetation within her supposedly decaying city. She embraces the ephemeral pleasure between the individuals responsible for her existence—the final oxycodone tablet melting on her mother’s tongue—the gavel that will deliver sentencing to the boys currently subjecting her to their atrocities. In this ethereal realm, the concept of the present ceases to exist. She is not just another young woman wounded on the floor, being exploited by men for her resources—no. She is fully aware. She represents the ultimate act of defiance.
On that sweltering night in Apartment C4, when Blandine Watkins transcends her physical form, she is not everything. Not entirely. She simply exists as the antithesis of nothingness.
Excerpt from “The Rabbit Hutch” by Tess Gunty. Copyright 2022 by Tess Gunty. Published by Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
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“The Rabbit Hutch” by Tess Gunty
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