Nightwork: Stories

This is the first collection of fiction or book I have read by Christine Schutt. I was far from the low ceiling of disappointment. Nightwork projects on the nocturnal screen of literature an extraordinary innovative style: Filmy. Organic. Deliberate. Sexual. Her sentences compacted; words intense, dynamic, sensual. The mechanics of her stories well-oiled, run on its own Schutt's vernacular. She addresses sexuality and kinship, mundane bondage, social rituals inside of bedrooms and in cars, diseases and deaths, with such keen honesty and blurred lucidness--I am made speechless. Her writing is the rawest and the most original I have been exposed to in the last two years. I consider her "Dead Men" in this collection riveting. As demonstrated from the following two excerpts: "she hears it catching and puts her hand out as if to press the dead man still when he is forever making noises-gaseous exhalations in the downward drift" and "The love she thinks, does not know or want to say he knows what she is-sore, a hole, a blankness he must try to strike." Others short stories such as "Metropolis" and "To have and to Hold" carry the same tone of a richly forbidden morbidity as "Dead Men".

I'm glad to see that Dalkey Archive has reprinted this most beautiful and disturbing book. I've owned the original Knopf version since it came out in 1996. These stories made me squirm one minute and pant in jealousy the next. The precision and the lean muscularity of each piece is almost disorienting. Along with Diane Williams and Gary Lutz, Ms. Schutt is writing some of the best prose around. By the way, check out the periodical "NOON" if you want to see what Ms. Williams and Ms. Schutt do in their free time.

Harmless Oedipal fun . . . plays well in Fairfield County

Most short stories today display no artistry, no understanding of the possible musicality of language. Schutt's stories are remarkable, not only for their subject matter, but for their language. Schutt is a poet of the first order, and her recently published story, "Sickish," in the KGB Bar Reader anthology, confirms her talent. She is a writer to be watched; she is the real thing.

Although distrubing or startling at moments, it is the freshness and curt wording that illuminates the underlying themes running throughout of childhood innocence and naivety clashing with the malevolance of reality.