Spotlight on … Christine Schutt Prosperous Friends (2012)

‘I do not want an impenetrable style but prize compression and music. I abhor quotidian easy speak, psychobabble, brands, news and slogans—a “writer’s prose” as Gordon Lish once described it. Mine calls for close, hard readers of fiction. This year in reviews of Prosperous Friends, I was bumped up from being a writer’s writer to being a writer’s writer’s writer; either way, it cautions challenging prose ahead. A lot is left unsaid and must be inferred simply because I want to avoid the dulling effect of belated language.’ — Christine Schutt

‘What do we make of the adjective poetic when applied to prose fiction? While meant as praise, the modifier often sways backhandedly—as eclectic does for a menu—warning that what’s ahead may prove puzzling at best or downright indigestible at worst. Certainly the description indicates the presence of typical techniques—rhythm, alliteration, figurative language, and the like—as well as a density of both locution and imagery. But when used to characterize prose, on book jackets or in reviews, there’s an abiding sense the word also signals effeteness and self-indulgence.

‘Christine Schutt has been tagged with this adjective throughout her career. Indeed, quotes from John Ashbery, who selected Nightwork as a best book of the year for the Times Literary Supplement in 1996, can be found among her blurbs. And the much-lauded author (National Book Award nomination, recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim, and a finalist for a Pulitzer) has done rather nicely despite the designation’s ambiguities. Still, it bears pondering, just what is this hybrid blossom, poetic prose, and how is Schutt’s fiction—rather commonly themed around incest, emotional disturbance, marital dissolution—particularly different for its presence in her pages?

‘Schutt works surprise and dislocation into the midst of efficient description to piercing effect: The plaintive “I wanted it” in the wake of the elegantly turned “smoke-thin nightgown,” or the aptly architectural “crooked roof of her arm” preceding the guttural “gagged and heaving sorrow”—these micro-contrasts in tone and imagery ably mimic consciousness at its most alert, most mutable, in short, most transcendent. The shifts set off tiny detonations that build in much the way that, say, a sonnet assembles revelations toward its clinching couplet. In Schutt, the poetic in her prose is not the obvious lyricism and compression, but their relation to the mundane and the broadness of plainspoken expression. When these juxtapositions succeed, she performs what Baudelaire, in the preface to Paris Spleen, calls the “miracle of a poetic prose,” writing that’s “musical though rhythmless and rhymeless, flexible yet rugged enough to identify with the lyrical impulses of the soul, the ebbs and flow of reverie, the pangs of conscience.”

‘Schutt may treat Fitzgeraldian themes of marriage, money, and thwarted affection (Isabel even quotes Nick Carraway’s famous line about being “both enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life”), yet her style is stately, more Jamesian, although her elliptical tack is James on a severe diet. This concision and its consequent rhythm—the narrator’s perceptions and the characters’ thoughts register in quick bursts of sharply struck notes—excite us; in their brevity and elevated pitch, her sentences sound ready to pounce upon intimate disclosure. Like James, Schutt penetrates to the core energies of human drama with a pointillist’s touch; feeling is lent graceful shape, less readily apprehensible, but ultimately more incisive. The poetic devices, however, can sometimes prove more compelling than the discovered content. But such instances only throw into relief the overall risk Schutt takes. Prosperous Friends presses adventurously against mere telling’s quotidian restrictions and attempts to enact “the lyrical impulses of the soul.”’ — Albert Mobilio, Bookforum

___
Further

Christine Schutt
Christine Schutt @ goodreads
A Conversation Between Christine Schutt and Diane Williams
Podcast: Christine Schutt on Bookworm
Correspondence with Christine Schutt
The Crass Class in Christine Schutt’s “Pure Hollywood”
Pure Hollywood – stories to take you out of your comfort zone
ISSUE 4 An Interview with Christine Schutt
Christine Schutt: Learning What You Do Well
Podcast: Between the Covers: Christine Schutt: Pure Hollywood
‘The Blood Jet’, by Christine Schutt
“Remembered Landscapes,” an Interview with Christine Schutt
‘The Dot Sisters’, by Christine Schutt
Uncomfortable Places
Glitz & Infidelity: On Christine Schutt’s ‘Pure Hollywood’
“something else, with it, in the sky”
the garden of earthly delights: christine schutt’s pure hollywood
Atmospheric Disturbances
Hanging Out With Christine Schutt
The Graduate
Matt Bell on Christine Schutt
Buy ‘Pure Hollywood’

___
Extras

Christine Schutt’s First Time

Christine Schutt Fiction Craft Lecture

Christine Schutt: The Writers Studio Reading Series

____
Interview

Michelle Y. Burke: One of the things I admire most about your writing is how it sounds. Your sentences are so rich and lyrical. To what extent are you thinking about sound when you’re writing?

Christine Schutt: I do think about sound. What I want to do is wed sound to scene. What comes first is a picture. I’m thinking of the way my new book, Prosperous Friends, begins. I had this idea that there would be a couple in their mid-thirties outside of London, maybe in the Fens, near a priory or a church. I was remembering my own experience at that age, being in those sorts of churches, and the stones, and the moss on the stones, and the coldness of it. I thought about that a lot, and I thought about what the couple was doing. They’re alone. He wants to surprise her and be sexually risky. I wanted to get a sound that would call up or be right for those stones and that place.

Burke: Is that how you start a new novel or story—an image catches your attention and you find the sound from there?

Schutt: Sometimes there’s an image, yes, and the language comes so fast on it. I look at something for a long time and roll over words right to the occasion.

Burke: Is that also true when you’re creating a character? Does the character come from an imagined scene or image?

Schutt: When I was creating one of the characters in Prosperous Friends, I looked at a postcard picture of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I bought it at the National Portrait Gallery. Then there was this quality my younger son had when his hair was long, and then there was someone I was making up: a handsome young man with a side-part. I liked this character so well I gave him some success.

Burke: Your story collections are like catalogues of compelling first sentences. The first sentence of “Teachers” in Nightwork—“She told her daughter as she might a love such things her lover said were best kept secret from a girl”—does amazing work at the syntactical level. What do you expect from a good first sentence, and how do you move forward from there?

Schutt: When I was an MFA student at Columbia, I was in class with people who even then were able to tell a story. I could not. What I could do, and what I was praised for doing, was write a great sentence. It was my only pride. When I tried to write a story, I thought what I was good at had to be put aside in favor of advancing the narrative. I would have a nice, rich opening, and then suddenly, I’d think about how I had to move the character across the room. The character had to say something, do something. Dreaded dialogue. I still have to work hard on it. Now I often take out every other line of dialogue. Then it actually sounds like human speech. Then you get something interesting.

Any success I had early on had to do with the fact that people would say, “Wow, you can really write a sentence.” Gordon Lish taught me how to use what I was good at to tell a story.

Burke: Has your writing changed on the sentence level?

Schutt: Yes. I’m not packing every sentence anymore. I’m not indulging that tendency as much. When I was writing Nightwork, I loaded the sentences because I could; I hyphenated a lot to make adjectives, very self-indulgent. I did that to a lesser degree in the second collection of stories, Day and Night. I have been looking for other sources of interest, along with interest in language and finding different ways of getting drama. So, yes, Prosperous Friends is different. I mean, there are descriptions of houses and barns I am proud of. I love dying barns. I love to look at them, but the characters and their movement take precedence; the exchanges between characters are sharper.

I was very confident about Prosperous Friends for a long time. I went around bragging about it, saying this is it, this is the best thing I’ve done. I surprised myself by saying such things. I’m a little superstitious. I thought I should stop bragging. The first time I turned it in, my agent said the novel was too difficult, too elliptical. Who are these people? How old are they? Where are they? The kinds of questions I’ve always been asked.

Then I had a younger reader weigh in on the sexual dysfunctions the book explores. She said, no, these kinds of dysfunctions don’t exist anymore. They’ve gone away. I was devastated when she said that. I thought, my god, they’ve really advanced, but I decided to keep all of the sexual dysfunction in, because they can’t be all cleared up, right? Not for everyone. It really threw me for a loop. Here I was writing about people in their late 30s and 40s, and I suddenly thought that perhaps I really missed the boat. Perhaps young people today are entirely liberated, at ease with their sexuality, and women are having orgasms left and right. In the end, I decided that can’t be the case, but it really caused me to have a crisis of confidence. A real crisis.

I wrote a new beginning to the book at one point. It was very clunky, but it came very easily, and I thought, all right, maybe this is the way to go, but I ended up throwing it out. When I came back from teaching in California, I got rid of it. But I inserted other things, clarifying things, and the book is finished, but I have not felt that initial certainty of its worth.

Burke: Do you think of your work as challenging? Difficult?

Schutt: No, I don’t. I haven’t. That’s why it unsettled me to have what I’d thought was finished returned with questions. My agent said all of the things that people said when I was doing my MFA: The writing is great, but where are we? How old are these characters? In the last draft of Prosperous Friends I changed the chapter titles to place names and the year.

Overall, I don’t think my work is difficult. I don’t write jolly stories, so maybe that’s hard for some readers.

___
Book

Christine Schutt Prosperous Friends
Grove Atlantic

‘Described by John Ashbery as “pared down but rich, dense, fevered, exactly right and even eerily beautiful,” Christine Schutt’s prose has earned her comparisons to Emily Dickinson and Eudora Welty. The New York Times Book Review described Schutt’s All Souls as “shot through with [Virginia] Woolf’s lyrical, restless spirit.” In her new novel, Schutt delivers a pitch-perfect, timeless, and original work on the spectacle of love.

‘Prosperous Friends follows the evolution of a young couple’s marriage as it is challenged by the quandaries of longing and sexual self-discovery. The glamorous and gifted Ned Bourne and his pretty wife, Isabel, travel to London, New York, and Maine in hopes of realizing their artistic promise, but their quest for sexual fulfillment is less assured. Past lovers and new infatuations, doubt and indifference threaten to bankrupt the marriage. The Bournes’ fantasies for their future finally give way to a deepened perspective in the company of an older, celebrated artist, Clive Harris, and his wife, a poet, Dinah Harris. With compassionate insight, Schutt explores the divide between those like Clive and Dinah who seem to prosper in love and those like Ned and Isabel who feel themselves condemned to yearn for it.’ — Grove Atlantic

____
Excerpt

Such exorbitant crying! Just when the old woman thought she had stopped crying, the girl would start again. The sound raised in the old woman gladness and amazement, and she lay awake to listen, but all she heard was crying; the rest she made up.

Infidelity? Boredom?

The old woman went downstairs to turn off the lights left on for the young couple now upstairs. She went close to the registry to see their names, but decided not to look.

What else did the old woman let herself know?

Their car was like everyone’s car. New York plates. They were a couple; they had signed in under the same name. The girl’s name started with a large and upright I, but she was not wearing a ring and the boy stood apart as if he were single. They were traveling to East Blue Hill but for how long was a question they had answered differently. The girl said maybe six weeks; the boy said three.

The boy, the old woman thought, was very pretty. A girl would cry over losing him, but this much?

The girl’s kind of crying was at a pitch that befitted a graver occasion. The girl’s crying was wholehearted, a baby’s kind, in no way self-conscious; but unlike a baby’s crying, the girl’s had nothing to do with discomfort or hunger. Hers was purely announced sorrow.

The old woman had heard and so had the old man.

The old man, the next morning, looking at the ceiling, asked, “What was that last night?”

The old woman shook her head and said, “Wasn’t it terrible?”

“So she wasn’t moaning?”

“Honestly,” the old woman said, and she looked back at where he lay with his hands behind his head. This was crying, the sound of which made the old woman believe that she, the girl, was in the right. Whatever cause was being fought, the girl deserved to win for her sincerity. Her swept, stripped crying was like an empty room, the boxy shadows on the walls, the unfaded parts against which beds and desks had pressed. Whoever had lived there, slept there, adjusted in front of a mirror there, was dead.

The rooms left by the old woman’s dead are all yet unused. The closets are full; in a laundry basket still are her father’s best shoes in shoe trees, a box, tissue paper.

Spendthrift mourner.

Ten years come August. She should clear out Daddy’s room to add a room to the Wax Hill B&B.

Ed and Aura’s is a farmhouse laddered with additions and trellises of clematis and roses; the inside walls are thin; the floors, slant. The rooms the Kyles let are low-ceilinged in the way of farmhouses, but the best of these, with the morning light, Aura gave to this couple. Aura gave the couple the whitest room because of the girl but also because of the boy. Aura had looked at the two when they were reading the brochures Aura always gives to guests. Aura considered their faces — they were probably not so young, not a girl and a boy, though she was of an age that turned everyone under forty into girls and boys, and so, too, these guests. The girl’s straight eyebrows, her wide-open expression, the girl’s face and the boy’s face — she would not tire of looking at them.

No matter. The couple left the next morning. They left before breakfast, which Aura thought was wasteful.

Age is some of the story. Aura has a spot on her hand that she is watching grow. Halved in a fold of skin for a time, it has looked like shadow, but now the spot is larger and outstandingly itself; nevertheless, Aura believes only she knows the brown declivity for what it is.

Ed is eighty-two and proud of it.

*

p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Hm, Seeing a car explode doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary to me, but I did grow up in car central. ‘Vengeance is Mine’, I can’t remember if I’ve seen it off the top of my head. This weekend I watched ‘Ice Cream Man’, which all the critics are excoriating at the moment, but I thought it was simple, gory fun. I think your fear is just a paranoia thing, or that’s the only way I can explain it. ** _Black_Acrylic, I would be literally shocked if that Jorvik Viking Centre dark ride is even remotely scary. Well, I hugely hope that this time enough people are smart and non-lazy enough to cause that Zoom writing class to happen. I and many others need to feel the heat from your Renaissance! Having a deep aversion to nostalgia for whatever reason, I’ll continue to watch for your ‘Shards’ reports. ** voskat, Hi. I’m safe, as far I can tell, and reasonably swell, thank you. Laura’s summer is the enemy. I pray that it’s only being kept alive by the heat, which would seem to be in its death throes, although you wouldn’t know it over here where we’re about to slide into yet another fucking heatwave. I will say hi to L. on Insta. Least I can do. I haven’t hunted for that post yet. Thanks for the reminder. xo. ** Steve, We’re apparently heading into another awful several days-long heatwave starting tomorrow or possibly even later today. Luck with yours. My weekend was mostly catching up on stuff. As I said above, I did watch ‘Ice Cream Man’. I really don’t get the critical vendetta against that film. It’s simple old school gory fun. What, critics want Eli Roth to turn into Christopher Nolan or something? New show! Everyone, The latest episode of Steve’s ‘Radio Not Radio’ is alive and on the move here. Steve: ‘Get up close and personal with a xenomorph to Icelandic industrial punk, go-go, musique concrete, church organs and more! This one features ROHT, Portraits Of Tracy, Charli XCX, Madamloss, The Need, The Tubs, Gentles, Worldpeace DMT, Odor Eater, Zoh Amba, Bill Hsu, Terry Riley/Claire Chase/JACK Quartet, Pino Donaggio, Midori Hirano, Beatriz Ferreyra, Michael Cloud Duguay, Cinna Peygahmy, Toru Takemitsu, Babal, wit., haru matsui, Sayf, Leo, NTFL & PVSSY, Sarah Sampp, Akiid and Trouble Funk.’ Nice line-up. Bill Hsu is in the house! Whoop! Thanks. Scurry through the heat as best you can. ** Rentedrooms, The Thriller dark ride was fun the first two times I rode it, but they really need to fork out the money for a new one. OC Fair, nice. My favorite things about the Pomona fair are the old school things like the ‘dinner place setting’ contest winners display, the creative cake making winners display, the pig races, and so on. And the stomach curdling food, of course. I don’t think I’ve seen that Manson movie, but I’ll check. Seems like I must’ve though. Weekend mostly passed the time, but at least we were still in between heat waves. Yours? Big up! ** Alice, Hi to you, Alice! Improved income is the Zeus head! Congrats! I like the Beach Boys, of course. Favorite … well, after ‘Smile’, their masterpiece, I’m very fond of the trio of albums that followed it — ‘Wild Honey’, ‘Friends’, and ’20/20′. I watched ‘Adieu au language’ again recently, and it really does make 95% of the films that have been released since it seem little more than timid and conservative. I’ll remember to follow _.hurryupandspinmeee._. Wait, hold on … I just did. Very happy to learn that you’re excited. Have a blast-plus in London if I don’t confer with you again before then. ** laura w, Hi. Yes, I played the first two ‘Luigi’s Mansion’ games. In the second one I reached a boss who was impossible for me to beat, so I quit, and now I’m wary of the third one. But I liked them while they were friendly to me. My tabac hasn’t closed for vacation yet strangely. Maybe it won’t go on vacation! My criteria for plane films is Blockbusters that I haven’t watched yet, which happily is most of them. That’s basically all I want on planes. And mainstream horror movies, although planes are pretty stingy with them. My weekend, as stated above, was fairly whatever but okay. It wasn’t too hot, which it is starting to be again today, so just not sweating and having to glare angrily at the sky made the two days okay. ** Steeqhen, I’m so sorry about your dog. Nature fucked up when it gave dogs shorter than human lives. It seems possible that ‘Castration Movie’ is on ok.ru or rarefilmm by now. Yep, I get a namecheck in ‘Totally Fucked Up’. Gregg and I used to know each other in LA back in the day. He wanted me to play a role in one of his films — ‘The Living End’ — but I declined. No regrets. ** HaRpEr //, Haha, Franzen as The National of contemporary lit. I think if he got called the Arcade Fire of contemporary lit, he’d think that was the coolest thing ever, haha. Well, you know how I feel about book tightening. Within reason. ‘Ingrid Caven’, excellent! I think Schuhl’s first novel is finally going to be translated and published by Semiotext(e) one of these years. ** Uday, I don’t think I’ve ever been scared by a horror movie. Or not since I was 6 years old or something. You’re almost out of there. Yeah, enjoy the tail end. Why does veganism have fascist connotations there? If you can say. Odd. Although I guess a lot of Americans probably think so too. ** Right. Today I spotlight a book by one of American fiction’s very best sentence writers, Christine Schutt. Have a look. See you tomorrow.