Christine Schutt
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All Souls: A Novel
Christine Schutt
In 1997, at the distinguished Siddons School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the school year opens with distressing news: Astra Dell is suffering from a rare disease. Astra’s friends try to reconcile the girl’s suffering with their own fierce longings and impetuous attachments. Car writes unsparing letters, which the dirty Marlene, in her devotion, then steals. Other classmates carry on: the silly team of Suki and Alex pursue Will Bliss while the subversive Lisa Van de Ven makes dates with MissWilkes. The world of private schools and privilege in New York City is funny, poignant, and cruel, and at its heart is the stricken Astra Dell, “that pale girl from the senior class, the dancer with all the hair, the red hair, knotted or braided or let to fall to her waist, a fever and she consumed.”
National Book Award finalist Christine Schutt has created a wickedly original tale of innocence, daring, and illness.
Christine Schutt
Florida is the portrait of the artist as a young woman, an orphan’s story full of loss and wonder, a familiar tale told in original language. Alice Fivey, fatherless at age seven, is left in the care of her relatives at ten when her love-wearied mother loses custody of her and submits to the sanitarium and years of psychiatric care. A namesake daughter locked in the orphan’s move-around life, she must hold still while the seamstress pins her into someone not her mother. But they share the same name, so she is her mother, isn’t she?
Alice finds consolation in books and she herself is a storyteller who must build a home for herself word by right word. Florida is her story, recalled in brief scenes of spare beauty and strangeness as Alice moves from house to house, ever further from the desolation of her mother’s actions, ever closer to the meaning of her experience. In this most elegiac and luminous novel, Schutt gives voice to the feast of memory, the mystery of the mad and missing, and above all, the life-giving power of language.
