Rabbit Season

On Tess Gunty's "The Rabbit Hutch"

First off, what are the critics saying about Tess Gunty’s debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch?

Via Bookmarks.reviews

Not even a mixed thought among them! Sam Sacks called it “the most promising first novel I’ve read this year” in The Wall Street Journal, Leah Greenblatt called it a “dense, prismatic and often mesmerizing debut” in The New York Times Book Review, and overseas the novel got hosannas from Sarah Ditum at The Guardian, who compared Gunty’s book to the work of David Foster Wallace, and the UK Times, where Robert Collins claimed that the book “[t]hrillingly blends the vivid realism and comic experimentalism so beloved of American fiction.” The tenor throughout these reviews, and many other debut reviews, is one of encouragement, a tenor which says: just wait till you see what comes next! “Promising” for Sacks, "stellar arrival” for Collins, “whatever comes next will be even better” for Ditum. We even got an “ambitious” from The New Yorker! The book has also been shortlisted for the National Book Award¹ alongside winning some debut book prizes. All that to say: a lot of hype!

What is it about debuts that so beguiles critics? The “stunning debut” of a “bold new voice” is a marketing cliché, born out of a culture that prioritizes novelty over quality. Critics at major outlets love to champion a new writer, not only from the thrill of being first on the bandwagon, but also the opportunity to break up the monotony of the publishing schedule, of reviewing reliable novels from hoary old reliable writers. The critic gets to introduce to the world a new talent rather than continue writing about someone with an already established reputation. I’m not saying there are no good debut novels – sometimes a talent really does come screaming out all at once, and to even go beyond the historical examples (The Bluest Eye, V., State of Grace, The Recognitions, Housekeeping, The Intuitionist, just to name a couple Americans), I’ve enjoyed Isle McElroy’s The Atmospherians, Catherine Lacey’s Nobody is Ever Missing, and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry over the past couple years – but they’re generally overrated. The sad fate of a debut author is either completely ignored or overpraised, the criticism taking on the form of a parent sticking their kid’s drawing on the fridge: wow honey, look at that!

Gunty’s novel, I’m afraid to say, falls on the overpraised side of the ledger. Maybe I went in with too high an expectation, but the book is a long slog through some of the worst instincts of contemporary fiction, self-consciously ‘weird’ without a strange beating heart. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but the novel’s excesses, so praised elsewhere, dragged for me. It is a novel with a promising (novelistically) beginning, a theoretically interesting ending, and a whole lot of stuff in the middle, much of it unecessary. It introduces an interesting conceit – tracing out the various lives of the inhabitants of one apartment building, a la Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual – before mostly abandoning it. There’s a compelling main character whose story is uncomfortably yoked to a series of bores. The characters speak to each other like they’ve all had time to prepare their remarks, delivering honed little speeches to one another that perfectly sum up their situations. “I was remembering this philosophy thought experiment that you were always summarizing to people at parties,” says one character on the phone, before explaining said thought experiment, in a scene that just could’ve been a flashback to said parties; “What I’m saying is we need to make room in our discourse for power abuses to which each party allegedly consented,” says another, in the middle of a confrontation which we’re supposed to believe is full of intense nervousness - “to which”??? “I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Just please don’t make me describe it” says another character, supposedly to the police, before giving a pages long detailed description of a night. It’s an imitation of life, never quite cohering into something effective.