A DAY, A NIGHT, ANOTHER DAY, SUMMER

by Christine Schutt

With prose that is at once sensual and spare, dreamlike and deliberate, Christine Schutt gives voice in this collection to what most keep hidden. Many of the stories take place in the home, where what is behind the thin domestic barriers of doors tends toward violence, unseemly sexual encounters, and mental anguish. Schutt opens these doors in sudden, bold moments and exposes the unsettling intimacy of the rooms and corridors of our innermost lives. Yet at the same time, her characters are often hopeful, even optimistic.

Startling and smartly wrought, A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer is a breathtaking follow-up to Schutt's widely revered debut collection, Nightwork, and her critically acclaimed debut novel, Florida, which was a National Book Award Finalist.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, The United States Of America, Literary Fiction, Literature, American

172 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wondrous, involving, precise but vivid. Also a tiny bit annoying. Sentence after sentence falls away slowly in your brain, making it work; you read again. And again.

Monday and Monday and Monday pass, all ragged-sky and midday-sun sameness, all closets and drawers she stares into. None of what kept time once works. (The Human Season')

Watch the way the drinking works on Orin's body, a bag of sand sagged in the easy chair, bobbing in the sprung-seated easy chair, a shapeless shape, a clay pale, a damp face, a man drunk on vodka, the bottle of which he keeps in his hand. ('Do You Think I am Who I will Be?')

The bedsit was hers, a place tunnelled to through dank cobbled streets the colour of slime. The journey was cold, but the bedsit was warm. I put my leg near the source and felt burned, yet hours and hours went by in her bedsit, and we were late for what was planned. (Young')

The stories are strong, often sexual, the details direct. Even though a lot of it is druggy (and often about the rich and young) what strikes is the accuracy:

The pond, in the centre of the island, was where we learned to swim, holding the soft bank and kicking such a froth until the bridge of my nose burned from snorting water and it seemed I was water, blinded and blued with water, my face all snot and spit. (Unrediscovered, Unrenameable).

Not all characters are strong, but a few great ones stand out, among others the mother who we see over three decades - old to very old - in 'See Amid the Winter's Snow.', and the complex Jimmy in 'They Turn Their Bodies into Spears' who both loves and hates his visiting granddaughter.

Not for everyone, those titles alone might put you off, they did me, but I'm glad I've bought this, rather than borrowed, it means I can dive back in, any time, and read some expert, tender sentences.

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Working at a library has its perks. For one, I can just randomly lock the door at peak hours, and nobody can stop me from that, ha ha ha, ha ha, oh wait they’d fire me in an instant if I did that. Maybe I should stop fantasizing about petty ways to wield power over people. I mean, where do I work, the library or a student loan company? But this new library gig is letting me scratch two several-year itches at once: working at a library, and having a job I can read on. And since Proust was a little dense for my mood today, I took a quick trip through the stacks and found this. The title intrigued me, and it was short enough that I could read the whole thing in the last three hours of the shift, so I kinda figured what the hell, give it a go.

And let me tell you what. It seems like Christine Schutt has kinda dropped off the radar. Wind the clock back to the Dubya years, and she was riding high! Florida got nominated for the National Book Award! John Ashbery proclaimed her first collection the best book of the year! And what does all that get you in the long run? Jack. Fucking. Shit. I mean, ok, she’s a professor and that’s a sweet gig, and she probably has the clout to get anything published, and I’m sure she’s living her best life. But nobody at my MFA program was talking her up, and even though she put out a book this very ear, it didn’t get a fancy profile on LitHub or Electric Literature, nor did it get the big displays at any of the indie bookstore I frequent. She does have three books sitting on the shelf of an undisclosed library in Metro Detroit, but I’m going to bet they aren’t getting read as often as they deserve.

Because this is some collection, yes indeed. It’s about one of my favorite themes, that of the abusable escape. Sex is the main one, drugs are the secondary, nostalgia and wishful thinking and fantasy are always in orbit. The characters find themselves running from their problems, and then they hit a point where they have to run from their escapes, and then things get interesting, then people examine their affairs and their addictions and their parenting styles and their relationships to their own parents, and aside from a couple semi-duffers toward the end (althugh the last story, wherein a woman ponders her affair with one of literature’s more disgusting shitbags, is terrific), it’s all terrific material.

And told so beautifully, too! Schutt’s language is elegant and fleet, full of surprising turns and verbs in places you wouldn’t expect them and just the right word, time after time. Even the two stories that don’t work out feature this. There’s one that could’ve been a great sexual awakening story, one that uses its setting very well, and then it decides it’s incest time and I’m still not sure what it adds. Then a story about a friendship’s strange turns ends up seeming like Thoreau fanfic, which, again, confusing decision. But even with those, you can just let the words wash over you and forget a plot’s even happening. Some damn good stuff here, and I’m excited to check out more of Schutt’s work. Elegant is our watchword today.

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It really shouldn’t have taken me this long to make my way through a volume as slim as A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer, but it was unavoidable in this case. My slow pace should not be misconstrued as being indicative of a lack of enjoyment, for the precise opposite happens to be true — you see, I read every story in here at least 3 times each because I couldn’t believe what I was reading, even as a Schutt-newb no longer.

The prose on offer here is simply so gorgeous as to be ridiculous, refined to the point of being potentially distracting. There’s really no way one read would be sufficient to absorb all of what’s happening in these stories. I’d finish a paragraph and be enamored with the miracle prose to the point of having completely lost my focus on the story itself. For instance, upon finishing the brutally bleak first story, “Darkest of All,” I knew immediately what I’d have to do: start over at the beginning and savor it slowly. And then I woke up the next morning and read it again. Each individual read yielded greater (albeit still incomplete) understanding and deepened my awe of it. Only then did I move on to the next story. A slow experience, as you can easily tell from the fact that it took me over a month to finish this collection, but so, so worth it.

As an aside, maybe it’s easiest to think of what Schutt does as being a sort of maximal minimalism. For as economical as these stories are, they offer so much to unpack, so much to wonder about, which combined with the hyper-deliberate poetic prose style makes for quite the intoxicating cocktail. Accordingly, I frequently find the experience of reading her work pleasantly dizzying in a manner reminiscent of some of my favorite maximalists (McElroy, Joyce, Gass, Young, Pynchon, Gaddis, etc.)

I enjoyed all of the stories in this collection, but if asked to play favorites I’ll single out “Darkest of All,” “Weather Is Here, Wish You We’re Beautiful,” “The Life of the Palm and the Breast,” “They Turn Their Bodies into Spears,” and the longest story, “See amid the Winter’s Snow,” which is a total heartbreaker that gutted me even on the third pass.

I read a lot of resplendent writing from a wide array of extremely talented authors, but Schutt is really on another level entirely, there’s just nothing else that hits me quite like it does. Pound for pound, she’s got to be among the finest American prose stylists and story writers, living or dead, and A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer is yet another testament to her peculiar and impressive gifts. Long may she live, long may she write.

Highly recommended.

[Laura Warrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christine Schutt is one of those writers who drives you a bit mad with how intricate, gorgeous and unsettling her prose can be. There's magic in it at the craft level: under her hand, words change shape and meaning, sentences that wouldn't work in any other story written by any other writer come to life in her pages. There were times I wasn't quite sure what was happening in the stories I was reading, but it was this disorientation that bewitched me and kept me reading. I was so entranced by the lyricism of the writing that I wanted to read more. Some of the stories I read more than once and will probably come back to again, not only to savor the gorgeous prose but to study how Schutt manages to tell such gripping stories in such unusual, lyrical ways. I'm so glad I discovered this book and this writer.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5, rounded up.) Though a few of the stories here are forgettable, or else too difficult to find purchase in before, indeed, they're over, it's true that each story contains such sentences as to totally astound any lover of the sentence. It is also true that the stories that work best — that would be the terrifically unnerving "Darkest of All," "See amid the Winter's Snow," and "The Blood Jet" — are absolutely worth reading for any student of the short story.

Schutt is a skilled stylist, and I thought this description from one of the stories here was a wonderful — albeit unintentional — distillation of what her stories are, how they work: "Uncertainties, instructions, moments of clarity and surprise, bright hurts."

Yes, that's exactly what they are, and how lucky we are to be audience to them.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Christine Schutt's prose is a little too fanciful at times, lending to unwieldy sentences and stories that have no true narrative drive. She is definitely talented, though. A story towards the end about a dying friend was my favorite. Very poignant; she has a kind of slow, reflective, loose style which doesn't make for page-turning absorption, but which made a story about slow, inevitable death indelibly poignant.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really liked this, which surprises me because it's precisely the kind of writing that tends to bug me--vague, somewhat elliptical, patently poetic. Yet it works. The writing is still very clean, and the impressions of heartache and trouble with which each story left me, in spite of the absence of many concrete details or a narrative arc, were real. Like reading a series of journal excerpts--private and quiet and sad.

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could one day write a single sentence with as much beauty as Schutt's I would be fulfilled. If you want to learn how to write fiction that refuses to disregard the art of the sentence packed with a universe of meaning, turn to her. I'd consider this work to be the poetry of fiction and I'd consider Schutt to be one of the best.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

every letter in every word

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite collection of my Mother's work. Wonderful.

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

We were young.

At a pub once and under swags of weeds we were meant to kiss by, my young husband said I was a fool.

What could we have been talking about when he said, "You don't know a thing about me"? He said, "You never did." *But I thought, I thought, I thought* was the way a lot of my sentences started then with him, then with her. Youth and appetite! Something else about this part of my life, when I spent most nights with a man I called my young husband—I kicked him for not coming sooner to the rescue with the cigarettes. I called him names at restaurants when I was drunk with visitors. I said, "Who knows?" when anyone asked me what he was doing. I said he was a liar when I was a liar, too. I went out of my way to hurt him, spending too much money—I was mean to my young husband, and I often no more knew why that was than I knew what it had to do with our lives.

And there was more that was significant. Her teeth, her mouth. And more, more you should know, how, about to board the plane for home, my young husband broke the bottle of expensive wine that he had saved so conspicuously. The wine was red, of course, and ran under and around my shoes.

[sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Schutt’s just-barely stories are made of beautiful sentences threaded discreetly with plot. So discreetly that the stories are close to prose poems. They are also close to certain dreams: uncanny and easy to forget, except for a few images or their atmosphere.

In the opening, and perhaps easiest to remember story, ‘Darkest of All’, a mother deals with her two teenage sons. One lives at a drug rehab facility, the other with her. The boy at home is popular with girls his age, with his mother too, with whom he has a vaguely incestuous relationship based on back rubs and surprise kisses. These characters, like all of Schutt’s characters, live bleakly, but she finds enough bleak ways for them to live so that each story stays distinct and mostly interesting. ‘See Amidst the Winter’s Snow’ held my attention least out of everything and felt a bit desultory despite, again, the beautiful sentences. In parts of ‘The Human Season’, phrases knock against each other, propelling themselves forwards (maybe in other directions, too), creating a voluptuous rhythm. On the last page of the story, we’re moved through the auditory texture of each season by descriptions of ambient sound, ending with: ‘Listen! The future in her ears comes out like this.’

[Jeremy Reppy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lots of people seem to like this collection of short stories, but I read the first two stories and found the writing and story to be poor. I skimmed some of the other stories in hopes of finding something better, but that did not happen. One of the rare books that I could not finish.

[Poppy Fields · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dreamy prose, but there was something missing from each story for me. There was no spark that made me want to know the characters or at least care about what was happening to them, and I kept reading in hopes of finding it, but alas I never did.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic, spectral, haunting prose...language propelled, lovely, frightening like lightning sometimes

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

better prose throughout the project. She has certainly found her voice, now she just has to find the stories.

[digital · Rating 3 out of 5]

Christine Schutt's Duchess of Albany is one of the best stories I have ever read in my life. Her style, so elusive and euphemistic, works to exquisite effect in that story: it supports the characterization of the protagonists, and it treats the subject matter with perfect and heartbreaking delicacy.

So I was won over by that story, and I took up this collection. Her style works less well here. I'm no slavedriver to the school of Everything Must Be Concrete and Specific, but I felt the Duchess of Albany struck a balance that these stories do not. The characters tend to sound the same, and not, perhaps, the sort of people who would speak the way Christine Schutt speaks, which is after all a very specific thing. Sometimes the dreamy vagueness of the plot gives way to sheer frustration when you simply can't make heads or tails of what is happening. Emotional portraiture is fantastic, but confusion is not.

Still, I love many individual *moments*. She has a way of talking about things, particularly sex and family (sometimes both at once!) which seems impossibly poignant. Meaningful in a way that other authors only gesture at. At moments her euphemistic tendencies can be frustrating -- spit it out already, Christine! -- but at other times it seems to allow you to consider these subjects from a different and more profound angle.

This collection did not stick, but I will try her again. She is special.

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is by another author that I encountered because of Shelf Awareness' Book Brahmin. In this case Christine Schutt was the author interviewed. After reading the interview, I wanted to know more about Ms Schutt's writing so I looked in our library catalog. This was the only book we had.

I am not sorry that I read these short stories, but it is hard for me to imagine picking up any more books by Schutt. Her writing was wonderful. Sentences like "The mirror, the mirror untethers the room and sets it afloat above the park." caught my imagination. Her writing is a treasure. However, I really didn't like many of the characters. I don't think there was anyone in the stories that I would want to spend time with. They are not evil, but not good either.

I often form a relationship with the characters in books I read. I liked knowing the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird, Dodger and Out of the Dust. I don't always like the people in Alice Munro's stories, but I might want to meet them. I don't want to meet these folks.

I recommend these short stories to readers of style, people who want to see the dark side of characters in books or those who regularly read short stories. Schutt is a good writer, it is not her fault that I didn't like the people in her tales.

[Mike Polizzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories here are elegant, effortless and high born. The characters all seem to branch from the same dysfunctional tree or at least would meet at the same parties. The details swoop from the charmed beauty of summer homes to the repugnancies of domestic violence, puberty, college life and squandered fortunes. Like Tina Barney and Nan Goldin's friends swapped places, but the cameras kept clicking. Reading it after Nightwork, the collection stands as a maturation, but I missed some of the rawness, a trick I can hardly blame the author for, that stuff burns up and we're lucky for it in the first collection. Here I appreciate the masterful voice expanding the environs to refine her chase.

[Miles McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me rethink the impact that individual style has on a work of fiction. The stories aren't that great - many of them are, in fact, very dark in nature. But Christine Schutt's profound style leaves a strong impact on the reader at second glance. Each sentence is artfully written, with careful detail given to the poetic and acoustic nature of each word and its placement in said sentence. If anyone is looking to get into the writing game and needs a good author to look at, I would definitely work your way to this work.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you enjoy the fractured language of Mary Robison, you'll enjoy Schutt's very odd voice in these stories. I enjoy both, natch. I found these stories to be eerily unsatisfying, but satisfying in their unsatisfyingness. I am a pretentious dickhead for saying these things. Anywho, this book is worth picking up if you're interested in experimental syntax and arresting glimpses into the shittier parts of humanity.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't just read short stories for plot, sometimes a general mood is enough to keep me interested, but this one for the most part was a little too vague. I could figure out what was going on, but there wasn't enough there to get me to care about these characters. You're on an island, good for you. But if you like dreamy prose, you'll probably like this.

[Twobbema · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not sure why this book rates so high. Each story is told in the rambling thoughts of the narrator. they were often disconnected and not all that memorable.I decided I am going to give her another chance by reading Florida, a National Book Award finalist.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

sometimes i come across an author and i think "i think i write like her in some respects" but usually i don't like it.

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really love her, but she gets old fast. If that makes sense. I can never finish a whole book.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I admired the passion that came through in the stories, however Schutt's overall vagueness didn't keep me guessing or wanting more, it made me care less about what I was reading. Such potential.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

woman understands your pain but does not care

[John Pappas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautful and skeletal. Though Schutt's metier appears to be longer work, these short sketches carry a strange vibrancy and poignancy. Elliptical and sincere.

[Cassie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think the reader has to work too hard to really connect to these characters or connect events throughout the stories.

One of the few stories I liked in this collection was "Winterreise."

[A.K. Benninghofen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to need to sit with this book a while before trying to articulate my thoughts about it.