From Library Journal
In Schutt's first collection of short stories, complex relationships between husband and wife, father and daughter are sensually and sometimes shockingly depicted. For instance, in one story a mother teaches her son how to kiss. These stories take a haunting look at what relationships work and do not work and what men and women are striving to obtain. The landscapes may be familiar, but the unthinkable sometimes happens. Recommended for sophisticated readers.?Vicki J. Cecil, Hartford City P.L., Ind.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A debut collection made up of 17 stories (or, in some cases, slivers of story) told in voices flattened by despair. The narrators here are mostly nameless, and the uneasy territory of their subject matter cannot readily be labeled. In the opening piece, ``You Drive,'' a grown daughter and her father cross the boundaries of any usual parent-child relationship as they sit in a car, sharing secrets, kissing and memorizing the smell and texture of one another's skin. In ``What Have You Been Doing?,'' it's a mother and son who kiss: ``She was out of practice and he wanted practice. . . . In the middle of rooms she obliged, in her bedroom, his bedroom, a kissing done standing, her hands on his shoulders, his not quite on her waist, heads tilted, mouths open.'' Another mother, in ``Teachers,'' tells her daughter details about her lover while the girl yearns to get away, begging to be allowed just to go off to school. The spareness of Schutt's prose, in combination with her elliptical storylines, can make certain pieces (notably ``Giovanni and Giovanna'' and ``His Chorus'') difficult to decipher at all. But when she works with more accessible themes, the results are powerful, as in ``Daywork,'' where two adult daughters guiltily clean out the attic of their mother's house as she lies dying in the hospital, and ``To Have and To Hold,'' as a spurned wife acts upon her anger and grief in her tiny and terrifyingly tidy kitchen. Schutt is good at small, sharp moments, and she chooses words with the care of a poet. But effective as some of these tales are, others feel fragmentary, incomplete. Taken all together, they're finally overwhelming in the uniform grimness of their point of view. Razor-sharp writing in stories sliced a little too thin--and admittedly close to the bone. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Christine Schutt takes us into the darkest reaches of a woman's experience and offers us a vision of tenderness and rage. Here are lovers, mothers with their children, sisters, friends and kin in all their gorgeous, transgressive intertwinings -- and, through an alchemy of language and feeling, here, too, is improbable grace."
Dawn Raffel
"Here is irresistible, jewelled prose, carried bravely up, word by precise word, phrase by exhilarating phrase, from a psychic underworld which tells us we are, all of us, rife with the powers of beauty and terror and tenderest regard."
-- Melissa Pritchard
"Unsettling insights and beautifully stylized prose propel Schutt's impressive first book. The writing is spare anti the stories brief, creating an effect akin to prose poetry."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Powerful ... Razor-sharp writing in stories sliced admittedly close to the bone."
From the Inside Flap
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
About the Author
CHRISTINE SCHUTT is the author of the short-story collection Nightwork. Her work, which has garnered an O. Henry Prize and a Pushcart Prize, is published widely in literary journals. Schutt lives and teaches in New York City.
