All Souls by Christine Schutt

A well-written--lyrically written--occasionally slight but more often affecting novel of girls in high school, including one who is very ill. And it made me think about the confidence the author can instill in me with a well-crafted sentence.

"Mr Dell, in his daughter's room, stuck his face into the horn of a stargazer lily, one of a ... one of a...must have been a dozen, and he breathed in and said, Wasn't that something."

That's the opening. And what I especially like about the sentence is not the nice snippet of dialogue, the carefully identified flower, the stammering that evokes an emotional state but rather that it starts, "Mr. Dell, in his daughter's room..." instead of "In his daughter's room, Mr. Dell..." It's a small little thing that non-writers surely don't notice, but the little turn-around really worked on me. It makes me look at him, and wonder why he's in the room, instead of making me look at the room. And it sounds just a little odd, enough for me to pay more attention to the language than I would have otherwise.

Florida by Christine Schutt

For those of us who live in Florida, it's worth noting this short novel is not set in Florida, but rather uses the metaphor of a dreamlike, paradise-in-the-distance Florida. The writing here is beautiful, particularly in the first half, which evokes a bittersweet childhood nostalgia (sehnsucht, the Germans would say--except I'm not sure I spelled it right). Then in the second half the narrator is older and the writing, previously so precise, minimalist and lovely, is not quite as tight. It's an interesting dilemma to age a narrator from childhood (where almost inevitably they are innocent and likeable even when they're not) to adulthood when they almost inevitably become less likeable. Part of the problem is the conflict in a child's life never really seems the child's fault, but adults we expect to work out their problems. And a lot of fiction (much like memoir, as Benjamin Kunkel points out in the NYTBR this week) is people suffering through their problems rather than addressing them. My undergrad class was just talking about using the hero's adventure structure in short fiction (Joseph Campell works nicely, you might be surprised to know, with Raymond Carver's "Cathedral") and how that can help create complex fiction which is not so hopeless as much of what we read. I could have used a little more of the hero in the narrator's second half of Florida, but over all it's a far above average read, and the people who fussed about this book being nominated for a National Book Award (the year the nominees were all women who hadn't sold many copies of their books) should hang their heads.