I've a hunch the mystical, magical and beguiling debut novel by Tess Gunty may garner this year's National Book Award for Fiction. Perplexingly, this is a novel that's difficult to pinpoint. It's a nouveau oeuvre for novels. Rabbits are mentioned in multiplying numbers like rabbits tend to do, throughout this including its title referring to the run-down apartment complex in Vaca-Vaca Indiana. The Rabbit Hutch is where a motley mix of eccentric residents reside. Our heroine, Bernadine, lives with three male roommates, all having recently aged out of the foster system. Joan, an obit writer inhabits the apartment just below the four. Joan hears them horsing around, "When you share the building with so many other people, people parked so closely together, between cheap walls that isolate not a single life from another." Bernadine is obsessed with mystics, and the paranormal. The novel is enmeshed in a preternatural aura whose characters are loosely intertwined by gossamer strings. The haunting opening lines draw one in as if falling through a surreal portal. "On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. She is only eighteen years old, but she has spent most of her life wishing for this to happen." Does this portend Blandine's early demise or a supernatural ability acquired? Macabre fascinations with death shrouds the novel in numerous ways. There's Blandine's fixation on ancient martyrs, Joan's s occupational obituary writing hazards, Moses murderous leanings towards Joan for her inept obit of his famous but neglectful mother, Moses' mother's selfie photo-op and exchange with Death, and the rage to kill just below the surface that flares up in people given an incendiary spark. Vaca-Vaca, once a prosperous industrial town has become desolate. It's now on the precipice of a major housing redevelopment. The foster family transitions the four foster teens experienced leave their histories a mystery. Blandine's scholarship to the town's only elite, private high school make her an outcast and vulnerable to the advances of her drama teacher. There's a tempest storm brewing in the background leading to an eerie, electrifying climax. Father Tim chimes in with his wavering devotion to the Church. "I want to meet someone whose suffering and talk with them as myself, not as some representative for a boss I've never met. If the boss is worth his salt, and he saw the data, he'd be pretty disappointed with the way we've been running his business." THE HUTCH pulls so many winning witticisms and unexpected twists out of its hat that I can't wait to read what's next up Tess Gunty's sleeve.
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