Nightwork
Stories
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In this, her first collection of stories, Christine Schutt gives exquisite and provocative form to feelings and memories. Nightwork is a masterful dreamwork, revealing our lives with the startling clarity we long for.
A young woman remembers, after a forbidden embrace, the exact quality of her father's skin, "pitted and stubbled under all that color." A girl recalls the strange kingdom that was her grandfather's estate, a place she came to inhabit only through betrayal.
Romantic linkings are often unexpected: mother-son, father-daughter, mother-lover-daughter. In "What Have You Been Doing?" a mother teaches her son how to kiss. In "Dead Men," a woman finds herself unable to be touched by her new lover without experiencing intensely erotic recollections of the lover who is gone.
The stories are sensually detailed and sometimes shocking. Hands, feet, breasts . . . bodies are known, as they are known, mostly in bed. "Before the dead man, she had slept by herself with her hands to herself like a poultice."
Here is an Everywoman, voiced from familiar enclosures: a house in the country, an apartment in town. The muted landscapes, too, are an Everyplace made of "wind and slashes of high blue sky in the heads of furious trees."
Schutt's fearlessness, her passionate honesty, is the source for the language of these splendid stories—night worlds, which may disturb our composure but enable us to dream while awake.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unsettling insights and beautifully stylized prose propel Schutt's impressive first book, a story collection. The writing is spare and the stories brief, creating an effect more akin to the compression of prose poetry than to conventional minimalist fiction. Many of Schutt's tales, such as "You Drive," focus on family relationships, interactions that are either latently or overtly erotic. In some stories--notably "Stephen, Michael, Patrick, John" and "Good Night, Sweetheart"--Schutt's obliqueness of manner is needlessly obscure. But for the most part, edgy atmosphere and descriptive beauty compensate for a lack of clear plot and conventional characterization. In the most powerful story, "Religion," Schutt writes of a group of children who have been rescued from an abusive cult. Also noteworthy is "Metropolis," about a conversation between a teacher and a student's mother. The author excels at painting corrosive images of corrupted innocence and at evoking a seething, sexualized violence that looms underneath the often mundane surface of her stories. Though some may find Schutt's style impenetrable and her subject matter uncomfortable, those looking for fine writing and acute observation will find much to admire here.