The Rabbit Hutch: A Novel (National Book Award Winner) - Softcover

Gunty, Tess

 
9780593467879: The Rabbit Hutch: A Novel (National Book Award Winner)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593467876 ISBN 13: 9780593467879
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

The Rabbit Hutch is a stunning debut novel about four teenagers—recently aged out of the state foster-care system—living together in an apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest, exploring the quest for transcendence and the desire for love.

“Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies—the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations.”—Raven Leilani, best-selling, award-winning author of Luster

The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving its residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, lives one of these people, a young girl named Blandine Watkins, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine lives alongside three teenage boys, all recently aged out of the state foster-care system, all of them madly in love with Blandine. Plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her, Blandine pays no mind to their affection. All she wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads. 

Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a group of people looking for ways to live in a dying city, a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents—especially Blandine—go to achieve it? Does one person’s gain always come at another’s expense? Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

TESS GUNTY earned an MFA in creative writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Joyland, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, Flash, and elsewhere. She was raised in South Bend, Indiana, and lives in Los Angeles.

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Blandine isn’t like the other residents of her building.

An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents ― neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana.

Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch.

Ethereally beautiful and formidably intelligent, Blandine shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives.

Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.

“Gunty writes with a keen, sensitive eye about all manner of intimacies―the kind we build with other people, and the kind we cultivate around ourselves and our tenuous, private aspirations.”―Raven Leilani, author of Luster

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

The Opposite of Nothing

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. The agony is sweet, as the mystics promised. It’s like your soul is being stabbed with light, the mystics said, and they were right about that, too. The mystics call this experience the Transverberation of the Heart, or the Seraph’s Assault, but no angel appears to Blandine. There is, however, a bioluminescent man in his fifties, glowing like a firefly. He runs to her and yells.

Knife, cotton, hoof, bleach, pain, fur, bliss—as Blandine exits herself, she is all of it. She is every tenant of her apartment building. She is trash and cherub, a rubber shoe on the seafloor, her father’s orange jumpsuit, a brush raking through her mother’s hair. The first and last Zorn Automobile factory in Vacca Vale, Indiana. A nucleus inside the man who robbed her body when she was fourteen, a pair of red glasses on the face of her favorite librarian, a radish tugged from a bed of dirt. She is no one. She is Katy the Portuguese water dog, who licked her face whenever the foster family banished them both in the snow because they were in the way. An algorithm for amplified content and a blue slushee from the gas station. The first pair of tap shoes on the feet of a child actress and the man telling her to try harder. She is the smartphone that films her as she bleeds on the floorboards of her apartment, and she is the chipped nail polish on the teenager who assembled the ninetieth step of that phone on a green factory floor in Shenzhen, China. An American satellite, a bad word, the ring on the finger of her high school theater director. She is every cottontail rabbit grazing on the vegetation of her supposedly dying city. Ten minutes of pleasure igniting between the people who made her, the final tablet of oxycodone on her mother’s tongue, the gavel that will sentence the boys to prison for what they’re doing to Blandine right now. There is no such thing as right now. She is not another young woman wounded on the floor, body slashed by men for its resources—no. She is paying attention. She is the last laugh.

On that hot night in Apartment C4, when Blandine Watkins exits her body, she is not everything. Not exactly. She’s just the opposite of nothing.

All Together, Now

C12: On Wednesday night, in the nine o’clock hour, the man who lives four floors above the crime is staring into an app called: Rate Your Date (Mature Users!). The app glows a deep red, and he is certain that there is no one inside it. Like many men who have weathered female rejection, the man in Apartment C12 believes that women have more power than anyone else on the planet. When evidence suggests that this can’t be true, he gets angry. It is an anger unique to those who have committed themselves to a losing argument. The man—now in his sixties—lies on his sheets in the dark. He is done with the day, but the day is not done with itself; it is still too early to sleep. He is a logger, past his professional expiration date but lacking both the financial and psychological savings to retire. Often, he feels the weight of phantom lumber on his back like a child. Often, he feels the weight of a phantom child on his back like lumber. Since his wife died six years ago, the apartment has seemed empty of furniture, but it is, in fact, congested with furniture. Sweating, the man cradles his large, bright screen in his hands.

nice enuf, like a dad, but fatter then his prof pic. his eye contact = wrong. doesnt ask about u and seems obsessed w/ the prices. velcro wallet, user MelBell23 had commented on his profile two weeks ago. smells like gary indiana. ssuuu

The only other comment on his profile was posted six months ago, by DeniseDaBeast: this man is a tator tot. suuuu

Noise rumbles from an apartment below. A party, he assumes.

C10: The teenager adjusts his bedroom light to flattering bulbs of halo. He runs a hand through his hair, applies a lip balm. Smears a magazine sample of cologne on his chest, although he knows the gesture is absurd. Angles the camera so that it catches his best shapes and shadows. His mother is working the night shift, but he locks his door anyway. Does thirty jumping jacks, thirty push-ups. Texts: Ready.

C8: The mother carries her baby to the couch and pulls up her tank top. He’s not supposed to be awake this late at night, but rules mean nothing to babies. While he nurses, he demands to bond, and the mother tries. Tries again. Tries harder. But she can’t do it. He fires shrewd, telepathic, adult accusation upon her skin. She can feel it. He sucks hard and scratches her with nails too tender to clip, long and sharp enough to cut her. With her free hand, she checks her phone. A text from the mother’s mother: a photo of Daisy the bearded dragon, wearing a miniature biker costume. Cushioned helmet strapped to her spiky coral head, black pleather jacket strapped to her belly. In a Hells Angels font, the back of the jacket reads: dragon disaster. The reptile peers at the camera from her perch on the dining table, her expression unreadable. The mother zooms in on Daisy’s dinosaur eye, which seems to observe her from another epoch, 90 million years in the past.

U got ur baby, I got mine!! wrote the mother’s mother, who now lives in Pensacola with her second husband. HA HA HA! Roy found the costume. . . . . . . isnt she a RIOT??? God bless u and my sweet Grandbaby

Agitated, the young mother swipes out of the text thread and drifts between three social media platforms, feeling the weight and warmth of her baby beneath her right arm, cherishing his tiny sounds of contentment as he nurses. As usual, predators are wreaking havoc on the internet. Predators are the only people in town. If she had to summarize the plot of contemporary life, the mother would say: it’s about everyone punishing each other for things they didn’t do. And here she is, refusing to look at her baby, punishing him for something he didn’t do.

The mother has developed a phobia of her baby’s eyes.

He is four weeks old. For four weeks, she’s been living in the cellar of her mind. All day, she has been feeding her anxiety with Mommy Blogs. They are dreadful, the Mommy Blogs, worse than the medical websites, but likewise designed to exploit your Thanatos. Mothering is the most valuable work you will ever do, the Mommy Blogs declare with rainproof conviction. Before clicking on them, the mother prepared herself for what she previously believed to be the worst possible diagnosis: You are a bad mother. But that was not, in fact, the worst possible diagnosis. You are a psychopath, the Mommy Blogs concluded. You are a threat to us all.

On her sofa, cradling her baby, the mother begins to panic, so she self-soothes. Deep breath in, exhale the tension. Let the forehead, eyebrows, and mouth go slack. Hear nothing but the whirr of the ceiling fan. She’s supposed to imagine her body as a jellyfish, or something. Visualize the boundaries between her body and the rest of the world dissolving. Her cousin Kara taught her these tricks, back when they were roommates.

Before she was a mother, the mother was Hope. “It’s funny that your name is Hope,” Kara once said. “Because you’re, like, so bad at it.” After high school, Hope got a job as a waitress, Kara as a hairdresser. Together, they rented a cheap house near the river. Kara had a taste for neon clothing, cinnamon gum, and anguished men. Her hair color changed every few months, but she favored purple. She was a bafflingly happy person, often belting Celine Dion and dancing as she cooked. Frequently, Hope...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593467876
ISBN 13 
9780593467879
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
416
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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