Tess Gunty
Tess Gunty is an American novelist who announced herself with one of the most remarkable debuts of recent years—a work of extraordinary formal ambition and emotional depth that won the National Book Award for Fiction and established her as a major new voice in American literature. Born in 1993 in South Bend, Indiana, Gunty grew up in the Midwest and was shaped by the particular textures of postindustrial American life: the struggling cities, the apartment complexes, the lives lived under fluorescent light and financial anxiety that form the social landscape of her fiction. She studied English and theater at Notre Dame, earned an MFA from New York University, and published her debut novel at the age of twenty-nine.
The Rabbit Hutch (2022), featured on WritersReview, is a novel of dazzling formal invention set in a single apartment building—the Lapine, in the fictional postindustrial city of Vacca Vale, Indiana—over the course of a single week. The novel unfolds through multiple perspectives: the traumatized young woman Blandine Watkins, who is obsessed with medieval mystics and searching for transcendence; her three troubled roommates; a recently widowed grief moderator; a woman compulsively reading and responding to online obituaries; and a dozen other residents of the Lapine whose lives intersect in ways they cannot see. The novel is a portrait of American loneliness and spiritual hunger, rendered through prose that ranges from bureaucratic pastiche to visionary lyricism depending on whose consciousness it inhabits. It won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and numerous other awards, and was named a best book of the year by publications on both sides of the Atlantic.
Gunty’s style is almost impossibly assured for a debut novelist. She moves between registers and voices with the confidence of someone who has spent years studying the formal possibilities of the novel, and her willingness to take structural risks—the novel’s mosaic structure, its use of online comments, its shifts between intimacy and distance—is always in service of its emotional argument about the difficulty of human connection in contemporary life.
The novel’s central concern—the gap between the spiritual yearning that humans cannot seem to stop feeling and the material conditions that thwart it—gives it a philosophical dimension that elevates it beyond social realism. Gunty is a writer who takes seriously the inner life of her characters, including their longing for something they cannot name.
Gunty lives and works in New York, and readers and critics alike await her second novel with the kind of anticipation usually reserved for writers much further into their careers. She has already demonstrated, in a single book, the rarest combination of qualities in fiction: genuine formal invention and genuine human warmth.