Notes from a Reading

Originally, I expected to be spending most of this week in Albuquerque, where I was to be giving a talk on E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and presenting an ecocritical reading of the landscape used throughout the novel. But as I’m sure you’re aware (unless you’ve been snowed and frozen in a cave for the past few days), the entire eastern seaboard got canceled this week--including my flight out of Harrisburg.

So, I ended up being in Lewisburg for the week, which gave me the opportunity to hear Christine Schutt read from her novel All Souls yesterday evening. Schutt is the author of four books: the novels Florida and All Souls, and the short story collections Nightwork and A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer.

After an introduction from Porochista Khakpour at Bucknell Hall, Christine Schutt took to the podium and gave a few introductory remarks about All Souls. She noted that she wrote the novel while she had a fellowship in California and was 3,000 miles away from the sorts of New York parochial schools, where she has taught for many years and that inspired the characters and situations of the novel. Schutt said, “It figures: You go 3,000 miles to get away from a place and you can’t think of anything else.”

It was that time in California that gave Schutt the distance from the private, all-girls schools described in her novel, which thereby enabled her to write the book.

I’ve written about Schutt previously here on The Penguin in the Machine, and attending her reading last night reaffirms my opinions on her prose. Schutt’s style is at once minimalist and expansive, an exercise in creative atomic physics: Although her prose is sparse, spare, and powerfully compacted, the words press against each other and explode into images that are evocative, reeling, nuclear--the sensations of her prose leave readers emotionally charged, glowing and warm, for hours after reading Schutt’s prose or hearing her clear voice.

Schutt manages details expertly, positioning them to stand against each other and cast shadows and reflect glows, as depicted in All Souls when Carlotta goes to visit her friend Astra, suffering from a rare disease, in the hospital: “By the time Car got to the hospital, visiting hours were almost over, but Astra was awake, and when the girls saw each other, they cried. Astra was hooked to machinery and fenced off behind a castered table, so that Car stood aloof and cried….And what had she brought to show Astra? Old photos, the colors too bright; the beach, a hurtful white against the blue of everything else. Astra in a tented costume and Car in a bathing suit, and both of them laughing at Car’s father, who had taken pictures then.”

Schutt is a fantastic writer--a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist--and yet I hadn’t heard of her work until December 2009. If you haven’t read any of Schutt’s work, I recommend doing so; hers is a voice that shows that there is still experimentation, edginess, and beauty in American prose.

Hamster Stories, or What Pets Say about Us

Hamsters, like high school, are one of those universals of American childhood. Even if your first-grade class didn’t have Snuffles the Hamster as a class project, where you and a mob of six-year-olds resorted to fisticuffs, name calling, and pig-tail pulling in order to determine who fed the rodent today, you’ve at least heard others trading their personal hamster stories like last year’s baseball cards.

Some hamster stories I’ve heard: the eighth-grade math student teacher who dropped his hamster into a pot of boiling tomato soup (allegedly by accident) and then attempted to bandage the poor critter’s limbs, the hamster who fled and then spent a year living in the basement walls while living off pilfered dog food, an escaped hamster discovered several weeks after its departure in the bottom of a bag of rice. And don’t get me started on the summer my next-door neighbor in Susquehanna’s dorms had two hamsters that I had to hamster-sit on the weekends--weekends filled with shrill hamster chirps. That resulted in lots of squirmy, squeaky, baby hamsters that tried to eat each other.

So let me make this abundantly clear: Hamster stories never end well.

And, as Christine Schutt shows us in her short story “To Have and To Hold,” gerbil stories are quite similar in their lack of happy endings.

“To Have and To Hold” homes in on a few moments in a woman’s life as she cleans her kitchen and chases after escaped gerbils--both of whom have eaten off their own tails. The narrator is shockingly candid about her feelings toward the pets: “I hate the gerbils. Nothing about them is cute; they twitch and gnaw. The animals live in a plastic night-glow cage set next to the stove, because this kitchen is small, even if it is on Fifth Avenue, and here they scrabble and play and shred their tray paper--dirty animals that eat their own tails.”

But Schutt isn’t writing simply to show us the horrors of rodents in the apartment; these gerbils squirm into the narrator’s consciousness, and the hiding places and cannibalism of the gerbils present a mirror world to the narrator’s own domestic situation. Her husband has taken a lover, somebody who has been a close friend of hers, and suddenly the situation of the gerbils--devouring their own tails in sport, spending their time hiding from each other--echoes the narrator’s life. Schutt works this metaphor deftly, avoiding anything as hackneyed as a direct admission of how the gerbils reflect her life.

Because, as far as the narrator can see, the gerbils do not mirror her life; she continues to see them as disgusting, as foul: “I admit it, I am driven. Last thing I do each night is wash my floor. One of the reasons the gerbils are such a problem is that they are so ridiculously dirty.”

Sometimes a gerbil is just a gerbil; sometimes, a rodent is more than that just a critter scurrying about. Schutt shows us how pets--loved or hated--can reveal the dynamics of a relationship, a domestic situation, or an outlook on life.

Schutt, Christine. “To Have and To Hold,” from Nightwork. Paperback. Dalkey Archive Press. 129 pp. $10.95.