Tess Gunty, _The Rabbit Hutch_

 I HAVE NOT BEEN this captivated by a debut novel since White Teeth...well, that's not true, actually, as I have been roughly equally captivated by Bennett Sims's A Questionable Shape and Kate Briggs's The Long Form, but The Rabbit Hutch, which is Tess Gunty's first novel, captivated me in ways that reminded me very much of Zadie Smith's first novel. 

At the center of Gunty's novel is Blandine (formerly Tiffany) Watkins, an intelligent, perceptive young woman from a part of the world that, like Irie Jones's Willesden, often gets written off: rust belt Indiana. Like Irie, despite her intelligence, she is capable of big mistakes; like Irie, she holds deep core values that she can sometimes articulate piercingly but other times has a hard time so much as naming.  And like Irie, she is trying to find a footing for her selfhood in the wake of a massive betrayal by a mentor, which leads to a spectacular confrontation. I found myself rooting for Blandine as fervently as I did for Irie Jones back in 2001.

Like Smith, Gunty invents a profusion of plausible, sharply individualized secondary characters. The other residents of the apartment all pop into three-dimensionality, especially Joan, the reclusive obituary website worker, and Hope, who is slipping into post-partum depression. Not only is the high school drama teacher (genus Assholeus Charismaticus) who betrays Tiffany/Blandine deftly drawn, but so also is his wife, who would have been just a stereotype in most novels. And then we have the sublimely cranky Moses Robert Blitz, a brilliant comic creation...but even the priest to whom Moses Blitz idiosyncratically confesses is interesting in his own right. Gunty has a Dickensian/Smithian fecundity in conjuring character.

And again like Smith, Gunty has extraordinary control over her prose. It is versatile, for one thing, managing not only Blandine's explications of the spiritual thought of medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, not only Moses's diatribes, not only the final message-to-the-world of dying child star Elsie Blitz, but also the bizarre confession of an online poster who signs himself "Mr. Boddy" and fears he is about to kill his wife with one of the weapons represented by the game pieces of the board game Clue.

Gunty's gifts, as that last detail may suggest, are so exuberant that they at times run away with her, and the ending of the novel is as open ended as that of White Teeth, but to tell the truth, I don't even see those as faults. For me, this was a Goldilocks novel--everything just right.