Tess Gunty discusses her debut novel, “The Rabbit Hutch,” during a free public award ceremony on Nov. 13 at VCU’s James Branch Cabell Library.
Some might expect that author Tess Gunty — winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction for her debut novel, “The Rabbit Hutch” — would be nonplussed about additional accolades.
They would be mistaken.
“Every form of recognition is equally meaningful to me,” says the Los Angeles-based writer. “It’s all really astonishing.”
Gunty will come to Richmond on Nov. 13 to receive the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, given annually by Virginia Commonwealth University to an exceptional debut novel published within the prior year. “The Rabbit Hutch,” published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, is set in a present-day, depressed Midwest town, with Blandine, a 17-year-old living with three other teens who all have aged out of foster care, as its driving character.
Though Gunty has been writing since childhood, the success of this novel has brought a lot of change to her life. “This past year has really required a seismic shift in thinking, in my attitude toward work and myself,” she says, noting that an editor suggested she regard promotional appearances as performances.
Her hectic promotional travel schedule slowed her work on her forthcoming second novel, “Honeydew,” but she made strides to get back on track earlier this fall during a residency in New Hampshire — no internet, no distractions. “I found I had to do real internal work to rehabilitate my creative practice,” Gunty says. “I had to spend time to rediscover the joy of writing I associate with childhood. [Then] it was about freedom, character, setting — not about appeal to market.”
The VCU honor is named for James Branch Cabell, a Richmond native whose 1919 novel, “Jurgen,” was challenged as obscene by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The book’s publisher and editor were charged in early 1920 under a New York state penal code for publishing an “offensive, lewd, lascivious and indecent book.”
Both were acquitted Oct. 19, 1922, and the book, which had soared in price and popularity during the legal battle, returned to print and acclaim. The history of “Jurgen,” and the latest waves of book challenges and banning, reveal the social and political impacts that can come from literature, Gunty says.
“Literature is so powerful because you enter it from a place of identification; … you’re fully inhabiting another person’s psychology,” she says. “That can create internal revolution that leads to external change.
“I don’t feel afraid [for] my own work, but I’m really worried about this effort to control … this great fear of knowledge and of art,” she adds. “In a way, it’s the ultimate testament to the power of literature. If literature had no power to affect history or events, [people] wouldn’t be afraid of it.”
