A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories

by Christine Schutt

Book Overview

The title of Christine Schutt's second collection strikes the theme of swiftly passing time that runs through each of the stories. In "The Life of the Palm and the Breast" a woman watches her half-grown children running through the house and wonders: Whose boys are these? Whose life is this? The title story tells of a grandfather who has lived long enough to see his daughter's struggles echoed in his granddaughter and how her unhappiness leads him...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810151537
• ISBN13: 9780810151536
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Triquarterly Books
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Duraslike Title for a Book Actually Very American in Flavor

She's a little bit like Ivy Compton-Burnett in that a) some of the stories involve furiously entangled family members and b) often you have to jump into the story, in a leap of faith, to find out who is who and who is speaking the lines of dialogue you are being presented with. Sometimes Schutt seems like a writer who begrudges evidence, who hands out each clue parsimoniously like a homeowner who doesn't believe much in Halloween and short shifts the Trick or Treater. But I believe, after reading some of her wonderful stories, that she is not ungenerous, just crafty. She knows, like Browning's Andrea Del Sarto, that often "less is more." That sometimes the best way to hook a reader's attention is to tease and provoke. And also that this minimal approach is actually a form of mimesis, that it mirrors the frustrating way we learn and apprehend things in real life, and so if it seems fanciful, it is actually a kind of social realism for our sad age. It seems that "approach" in the last sentence is a misnomer, and I should have used whatever word is the opposite of "approach." In "Do You Think I Am Who I Will Be?" for example, I still haven't figured out why our sad sack narrator can't get any water in his apartment. Even at the end, when finally he gets enough water to fill up the rest of his glass of Scotch, I never managed to find out what had happened. Was he living in a dry state? Was he being punished in some future world in which water is rationed the way sugar used to be during World War II? I find Schutt very moving, like Virginia Woolf, in her treatment of the women in her stories. I will never forget the young mother in "Darkest of All" who can't keep her hands off her kids, or the young wife in, well, "Young," who realizes she has made a mistake early on in her marriage, and finds a novel way to work out her misgivings. I don't think she's so great at men. They seem (I mean, "we" seem) like a species mysterious to her, like the elephant in the old fable of the blind men and the elephant. But I'm sure that it's hardly noticeable because the mood of her stories is always both luscious and spare, and because we feel confident in her trajectory as a whole. She is one author I would love to meet one day, so I could thank her for opening up a new world for me, a world of intrigue, made of ordinary things, like Ann Hamilton's vast sculptures created of discarded index cards from card catalogues.

"It is hard to live above time."

In this striking collection, Schutt's prose is thrifty, skillful and mesmerizing, her stories riveting. The author offers a vision of the inner workings of the human psyche, her protagonists unabashedly revealing their flaws. Each story stands alone on its merits, small islands of truth, isolated incidents that make up the whole cloth. The author illustrates exactly how our days are lived out, in moments, decisions, encounters that are remembered later. In subtle and powerful language, Schutt observes the human condition, her message clear and precise. "Darkest of All" considers the ambivalence of motherhood, small, fragrant boys grown to unpredictable young men; the mother hides her fears behind walls of her own invention; another reminds of the careless intimacies of college life ("Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful"), the focus on pleasures of the moment, knowing it is only a fragment of the rest of a person's life. Yet another meditation on the intransigence of youth and the passage of time is found in "Do You Think I Am Who I Will Be?" Life is viewed through the prism of age. In "The Human Season", a mother yearns for a visit from her son, who is a great comfort, but he will not come, refusing to bring his new girlfriend to the place where his mother resides with an abusive man, a cad who is bitter and jealous of the mother-son relationship; "The Life of the Palm and the Breast" addresses the sweet pleasures of love and family, so intensely vital that caution lingers in the air, whispering "what if"; a young woman's visit to her grandparents awakens long-forgotten memories in "They Turn Their Bodies into Spears", the quietude and adaptation of old age interrupted by the energy she brings to their home, stimulating recollections of her mother. These thoughts stir the air, unsettling. Schutt examines emotions in each small gem, always with an eye on the passage of time, when the past is all there is because the future disappears, eaten by each new day. There are moments of youth and joy; there are moments of grief and despair. In another tale, "Unrediscovered, Unrenamable", a young son's innocent awakening on a summer island is silenced by his mother's cruel and crude response, when he asks, "But what is my purpose?" And in "Winterreise", we learn the pain of watching a friend suffer, sharing the present and avoiding the past, "whatever came before and marked her has been sanded away". In all of these stories, shards of lives are cast on the ground, where the light touches each briefly, illuminating, then moving on to the next. The collection is written from the perspective of a certain age, the smoldering wisdom that informs the very things that once were puzzling, now ring clear. Schutt possesses a unique gift, a poetic voice that surfaces in the structure and sound of her language. Her voice is individual, recognizable from one tale to the next, as she bites off pieces of lives, each new taste revealing human nature and the conse