Tournament of Books discussion

Space to discuss the TOB contender The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty.

This was only an average read for me. I thought I would be more engaged since I find the topic of young people aging out of the foster system of great interest. I just never connected with Blandine.

And I was really taken with The Rabbit Hutch. It was so weird! Especially the part about the sitcom star. I felt for Blandine. I liked that the author never really said if the teacher was just an abuser or if he really sincerely liked Blandine/Tiffany. I was very impressed and moved by this book.

Janet wrote: "This was only an average read for me. I thought I would be more engaged since I find the topic of young people aging out of the foster system of great interest. I just never connected with Blandine."

I agree, just meh. I kept waiting for it to get really good or good with all the hype.

I totally loved this! There was so much going on here and it was so well done, I was surprised -- even the peripheral characters were complex. I particularly enjoyed watching Tiffany/Blandine giving James a blistering upbraiding -- you almost never find this kind of thing in lit, and it is sorely needed!

I loved the Tiffany/blandine sections, and the son of the actress ones even more, but not so sure about the roommate ones…did anyone else find their obsessive devotion to her- and the sacrifice motif that ends up playing a disproportionately large role in the book- just kinda weird and silly? Comic relief of a sort given too major a role to play in the plot and unjustifiably so?

Joy, I found it kind of gross.

Joy wrote: "...did anyone else find their obsessive devotion to her- and the sacrifice motif that ends up playing a disproportionately large role in the book- just kinda weird and silly? ..."

To me, it seemed completely realistic that three 19-year-old boys, on their own for the first time, would compete for a girl in a completely boyish way, especially when she was so seemingly aloof.

But the son of the actress sections were the ones I found bizarre.

I really enjoyed this book overall, in the sense that I found it terribly sad & tragic, but beautifully written.

I feel really out of tune with most of you this year. I just tried a second time to push through =The Rabbit Hutch= after DNF'ing prior to the longlist. (I wanted to like it, I picked it out before I knew it was a contender...) The opening chapter seemed really strong to me, but when I got to the newspaper coverage of the disruption of the planning commission dinner, I dunno - not wacky enough to be farce, not serious enough to be real. I gave up again ... despite having actually lived in Vacca Vale (well, the real-life model for Vacca Vale).

I wonder, Tim, if your familiarity with “Vacca Vale” actually contributed to the disappointing experience you had here. What seemed to some of us like a fresh perspective might have felt to you less interesting or even inauthentic. Perhaps the descriptions weren’t enlightening; they were unconvincing. Whereas, I, who’ve never been to the sort of place the author describes, kept leaning in to find out more.

Sometimes having lived in the setting of a novel is a plus. For example, my experience living in the French Quarter definitely contributed to my appreciation of The Passenger — I kept saying out loud, in wonder, “Exactly this!”

Sometimes, it’s a minus — especially if it feels as though the author didn’t quite get it “right”, This can be so despite our understanding that fiction is fiction, and when we are prepared— at least intellectually— to give an author leeway to embellish or change a setting with which we are personally familiar.

Our emotional reaction to the rendering of a setting we know well can nonetheless affect how strongly we do or don’t connect with what the author is doing in the novel. It can make the novel feel more authentic to us, or less. At least that’s been true for me on more than one occasion.

Risa wrote: "I wonder, Tim, if your familiarity with “Vacca Vale” actually contributed to the disappointing experience you had here. ..."

Yeah, that's a good question. I left Vacca Vale before Tess Gunty was a glimmer in her parents' eyes, so we probably had very different experiences of the town. But in this particular case, it really was the journalism about the dinner disruption that exasperated me. It didn't quite seem strong enough for farce, and (maybe her experience with local journalism is different from mine) it didn't seem convincing enough to be realistic. I can stick a pin at the end of that chapter and say that's exactly where I gave up.

Again, a shame, because I found the opening chapter quite compelling...but I was getting impatient with the laundromat scene, which also didn't ring true to me.

Maybe this is the right question to ask - because this could be my wrong-headed prejudices that I need to overcome:

Did the fans of this book feel like those two scenes - the laundromat, the journalist's report - were compelling evocations of what they purported to represent? Maybe I'm wrong - maybe Tess Gunty was capturing those things exactly right, and I need to be open to recognizing that. Maybe that awkward soliloquy about Hildegard was exactly on point, and I'm not recognizing it. Maybe the report on the dinner is exactly what Vacca Vale reporting would have been like.

I was listening to a review of =The Passenger= this weekend, and the reviewer, a literature scholar, sniffed at all the math and physics gobbledygook (not their exact word, but their exact feeling about it nonetheless) in the book - because, of course, none of it had any resonance for them. But it did have resonance for me, and once I got over my initial mistrust, I found it evocative and important for the atmosphere. It made me like the book more, and that Cormac McCarthy scholar like the book less.

Although RH won’t end up in the top echelon of this year’s shortlist for me, there were parts I liked a lot. I don’t think I took any of the scenes as reportage, but I remember liking the “conversation” in the laundromat. It felt like Blandine was working out her thinking by thinking her ideas aloud, and her neighbor was mostly the blank canvas on which she was painting. That seemed like something a precocious young person might do, if perhaps at lesser length than Blandine went to in her monologue with her neighbor.

And, without spoiling things for you because you DNF’ed this one, the callback to that scene at the very end of the novel was beautiful to me.

I thought the laundromat scene evoked Blandine as one really odd girl. And at least the content of the dinner disruption seemed to me to be included to show another aspect of Blandine's oddness -- her fixation on Vacca Vale and her inexplicable belief that she could effect its outcome. (As for the local reporting, I've definitely read similar types of writing in some small town news.)

But to me, all of that contributes to our early understanding of who Blandine is today. It's only later in the book that we learn how she became that. And I echo what Risa said about the callback to the laundromat scene.

Of all the shortlist, this was the one I expected to like the most and I very much did not like it. I thought that the writing was very good and I noted a few passages. I loved every chapter that had nothing to do with Blandine, which is to say, a few of them. But Blandine, as a character did not work for me and the constant meditations on her beauty, oddness and charisma just made me nope out all the harder. And that she spoke like a twitter thread rant did not help!

Has anyone else googled the author's image and been unsurprised at how she looks exactly like she describes Blandine?

Alison, interesting point about Tess Gunty physically resembling the fictional Blondine. I just looked her up, and she does! I listened to this book in audio, and I think that helped me get through it. I also took a look at a paper copy, and the sections in Blondine’s voice look difficult to get through. The audio made that a smoother experience. Overall, I remember liking this one but not loving it, but now that I’m a few weeks out from reading it, I’m having trouble remembering the details, which means the book didn’t make a strong impression on me. I also recall thinking that the ending (which had been foreshadowed to death by that point, no pun intended) was a trick I didn’t appreciate.

Sharing this fantastic interview with Tess Gunty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSud5...

(In general I recommend following this vlogger/podcaster, he's fantastic.)

Alison wrote: "Of all the shortlist, this was the one I expected to like the most and I very much did not like it. I thought that the writing was very good and I noted a few passages. I loved every chapter that h..."

This, this, this. I agree with you completely, Alison. I thought the weirdness would be my thing and it actually didn't lean into that enough. The glow man and his child-star mother were the best sections and I want to read more of that book.

Peggy wrote: "Alison wrote: "Of all the shortlist, this was the one I expected to like the most and I very much did not like it. I thought that the writing was very good and I noted a few passages. I loved every..."

Yes, the chapter with the glow man in church was the best chapter.

argh, I don't know what to think about this book! I'll probably need some time (and maybe the TOB) to digest it. I loved the writing at times, but was often confused (maybe a shortcoming of doing this one on audio). I did like Blandine and liked the ending quite a bit, but how we got there sometimes felt too... something... I don't know what.

Edited to add: I just saw that there are a lot of graphics in the book that I missed out on by doing audio. Sometimes there's a pdf you can download but I can't seem to find one. If anyone knows of one let me know! Otherwise might have to drop by my bookstore to browse the graphics!