Still, despite the weaknesses: a dazzling start for a writer we want to hear from again.
Often brilliantly written if far too brief first novel from Schutt (Nightwork, stories: 2000) about a dotty AWOL mother and her young daughter set adrift among rich relatives in the Midwest
To narrator Alice, “Florida” signifies the hopeful period before her father died in a car accident, the dream of sunshine and good times that her flighty, pampered mother, also named Alice, recalled as she worked on her winter tan in a sunfoil bed. By the time Alice is ten, Mother has run through a succession of abusive men she refers to collectively as “Walter,” and her own private Florida becomes the refuge she takes in the sanitarium for the rest of her daughter’s childhood. Mother’s desertion leaves Alice in the care of wealthy relatives who live in various houses along a lake in the chilly “land-of-lakes state.” First, she’s stuck with stingy, proprietary Aunt Frances and flashy, adventurous Uncle Billy; only their loyal uncomplaining driver Arthur displays real fondness for Alice. As a teenager, she lives in the fabulously appointed Big House of her aged Nonna, wheelchair-bound and mute after a stroke. Schutt’s narrative is made up of elegant, sometimes maddeningly elliptical vignettes repetitively entitled “Mother” or “Arthur” or “The Big House.” These furnish tidbits of memory about each character or place: Uncle Billy takes the family along “prospecting” in Arizona, Nonna reveals that she never had any room in her heart for her wayward daughter. Schutt has an ear for marvelous, startling sentences. “The brown yolks of his eyes had broken and smeared to a dog-wild and wounded gaze,” she writes of one Walter; young Alice’s high-school teacher, Mr. Early, the first to encourage her to write, is described as “pinball body, angry nose and bald spot.” Unfortunately, the underdeveloped second part, following Alice to New York to teach literature while Mother gradually deteriorates in homes in California, never holds together.
Still, despite the weaknesses: a dazzling start for a writer we want to hear from again.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8101-5150-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
