It’s hard to imagine a better reception for a debut novel than the one Tess Gunty is getting for “The Rabbit Hutch.” The Los Angeles author’s book, published in August by Knopf, is a finalist for this year’s National Book Award for fiction, which announces the winner on Nov. 16, and it won Barnes & Noble’s Discover Prize.
But if Gunty had taken the advice of some well-meaning people who know the publishing industry, none of that might have happened.
“I received a lot of advice from people who told me to try to do something a little safer, a little less risky,” she recalls. “That was advice that I found incredibly depressing for a long time because I didn’t know how to not be myself or not be weird.”
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Gunty’s novel follows the residents of the La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex in fictional Vacca Vale, Indiana, a town that was economically hobbled after the closing of an automobile factory. There’s Blandine, an 18-year-old woman living with three young men who, like her, have grown too old for the foster system; she’s obsessed with medieval mystics and trying to stop the construction of a luxury condo building. As well, there’s Joan, who moderates comments for an obituary website, and Hope, a mother who’s developed a fear of her baby’s eyes.
These characters, and others, are doing their best (or not) to deal with anxiety and dread as they make their way in a town that’s down on its heels. Gunty, who will be appearing with Michelle Huneven on Nov. 2 at Barnes & Noble The Grove in Los Angeles, answered questions via telephone about her novel. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q. How did the idea for this novel come to you?
I spent most of my life in South Bend, Indiana, which is a small post-industrial city in the Midwest, and I had just moved to New York. I’d been living there for about a year, and I found that all of my writing was drawn back to that place. I realized that the Rust Belt is just vastly underrepresented in the American imagination, and I wanted to write something that was particular and precise and just attending to a place that I felt was quite neglected.
Q. Is Vacca Vale based on South Bend?
I wanted to make it a fictional place so that I could pull from a number of cities in the Rust Belt. I was thinking specifically of Flint, Michigan and Gary, Indiana and Youngstown, Ohio, but of course my town as well.
One difference between my town and Vacca Vale is that in South Bend, the University of Notre Dame is there, and is now the primary employer of the place. So when Studebaker automobiles — which was the primary source of town identity and an enormous generator of prosperity in its heyday — closed down, there was this other source of economic prosperity that could absorb some of the economic shock.
But in a way, Vacca Vale was a thought experiment: If this other employer hadn’t been there, what might have happened? And of course, even with Notre Dame being present in South Bend, many people were left behind, because not everyone can just transition from a job at a factory to a job at a private university.
Q. There’s this undercurrent of Catholicism running through the book. Was any of that influenced by your growing up in the hometown of the most famous Catholic university in America?
Yes. I was raised really Catholic, and South Bend is a very Catholic town. I only went to Catholic schools from preschool through college. I went to Notre Dame, and my dad worked there, and my parents were very Catholic as well. My mom was in a convent at one point; my dad was seriously considering the priesthood. So it infused everything in my childhood. And even though I started to drift away from those ideological systems when I was 15 or so, and I don’t really identify as Catholic anymore, it was a sort of language that I was raised in, a system of interpretation of signs and symbols and figures. But it definitely influenced every aspect of my life, and so it found its way into the novel.
Q. The novel obviously follows a variety of characters. Was there any particular one that came to you first?
Joan came to me first, actually. The first section that I ever wrote was one between Joan and Penny, which ended up toward the end of the book. But I had recently listened to an interview with someone who moderated comments on an online obituary website, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about what that job might do to a person’s brain over time and how that might influence the way that they think about things outside of work.
Q. A lot of the book centers on Blandine. Was there a particular inspiration for that character?
She kind of appeared to me. I could almost see her. I just had this image of a teenage girl in oversized clothes, who looked like she hadn’t slept in a while, and she had this otherworldly glow. She was standing in front of a gas station and drinking this blue slushy. And I felt that I knew she wanted to be a mystic but that she wasn’t religious, and that was all I knew about her. There was something about her unlikely pursuit of mysticism, in her particular context, that I found compelling. So I just started there and followed it.
Q. Did you share Blandine’s fascination with what she calls the She-Mystics?
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Yes. I think growing up in this highly patriarchal religion, even as a child, we were offered so few female figures to look up to or even relate to. But once in a while [in Catholic school] we would learn about these medieval women mystics, who claim to have some kind of divine experiences of vision or divine ecstasy. I became really attached to Hildegard Von Bingen, who was a 12th-century Benedictine abbess and polymath and just a really incredible historical figure. I was especially drawn to her ferocious curiosity and intellect. She had this unusual intellectual firepower in addition to her spiritual visions and writings. So she became the heroine of my heroine.
Q. There’s a lot of humor in the novel, which might surprise some readers, given its subject matter. Do you think it’s important to have those kinds of elements in a novel that deals with serious issues?
I think humor is kind of inextricable from darkness, and tragedy and comedy are so inextricably linked. When I’m trying to write about something painful, humor just almost always emerges. It’s not really planned; it just happens [when you’re] attending to the absurdities of everyday life. I’m really interested in the way that humor can reveal otherwise concealed truths. I was reading a lot of Joy Williams at the time, and she is to me one of the funniest writers. She’s funny often because she’s doing what all good writing does, which is taking something familiar and altering it a few degrees so that it becomes unfamiliar.