While Schutt is known as a stylist, she’s also a purveyor of suspense this time around. Yet even the darkest themes are rarely weighty with prose so nimble and offhand glints of humor. A sense of menace permeates this book, as accidents, misfortune and death amass from one story to the next. She casts startling, jagged turns of phrase – “The permanence of his absence is a noise she hears when she listens to how quiet” (sic) – and coaxes stories from an accumulation of details. Schutt, a part-time Mainer who was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, might well be called a story whisperer. What they all have in common is a visceral, unsettling clarity that makes them stick. Several of the stories are miniatures, almost vignettes. In one sense, the book is indeed very Hollywood – dramatic, visual, with special effects, and characters whose names, such as Arden Fawn, Lolly Hedge and Stetson Deminthe, are nothing if not theatrical. At 144 pages, it includes 10 short stories, plus the novella of the book’s title. Christine Schutt’s “Pure Hollywood: And Other Stories” is a wisp of a book, as rich as it is thin.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |