| Flat Girls Living in a Flat World |
January 9, 2009
I was surprised by Christine Schutt's new book, All Souls. Schutt has an impressive resume --a short story collection named TLS's Best Book of the Year in 1996, and her novel Florida was a 2004 National Book Award finalist -- but this book is terrible. Really terrible. Was she trying to be funny? She isn't. Clever? Nope. Moving? Enlightening? Entertaining? No, no, no. I am sure she can be and hopefully in her next book, she will be. But not here, not now.
Schutt's characters are flat and sentimentally portrayed, or worse, are stereotypes of the ugliest kind. As a teacher at a private school in Manhattan, Schutt must know what girls are like and yet I did not find a single one of these characters -- nor their mothers -- real in any way. Her characters are snapshots of people quickly judged and categorized and then left static and unchanging in their categorization: rich girl with heart of gold, poor ugly duckling kid, skinny blonde bitch, fat chirpy girls, brilliant but tortured anorexic, self-centered and completely clueless rich mothers dressed in fur and drenched in Norell. The only slightly
flesh-and-bone characters are the teachers but even there, Schutt
throws in a flat stereotype (spinster teacher) to shake up the "plot." If I am wrong and Schutt's characters are accurate representations of certain types of people, then they are caricatures at best, and utterly stagnant, banal, and predictable, at worst. And worst is most of the book.
I did not care about anyone in the book. Given the scenarios of a girl dying of a rare disease, seniors trying to get into college (I am approaching that with my own kids, so it should interest me), teen self-abuse and abuse, I should have cared. In Hairstyles of the Damned, featuring teenagers with some similar issues, the kids were portrayed with originality and yet genuineness, as well as with some warmth and compassion (notwithstanding explicit details of their sometimes horrible behavior) and their parents were also presented blemishes and all, but very real. And so I did care, a lot, for the characters in Hairstyles of the Damned. In All Souls, I could barely keep them straight.
Schutt should also pledge to never use the adjective "oily" ever again. She uses it too frequently and in different contexts, and never in any manner that serves: no idea or character is illuminated or deepened by her use of "oily."
Do not bother to read this book. From what I've been told about the TV show, Gossip Girl is much more fun and real, too.
|
|