My first encounter with Christine Schutt’s work was in an undergraduate fiction workshop with Leni Zumas, in my senior year. I was 19, in a perpetual fever dream from working graveyard shifts at a grocery store, unskilling myself at sleep. It was an advanced workshop in which I did not belong, and was only admitted because I petitioned with a story to ‘prove’ my eligibility. Perhaps the story wasn’t bad, but I stole the main character—a garrulous New York cook made corner-famous by his barbequed banana splits—from a documentary (I Like Killing Flies), so the most commanding parts of the story weren’t really my own. I didn’t understand plot or story mechanics, either. In our first class meeting, Leni wrote her name on the board “Leni rhymes with Rainy.” I’d proudly read her first novel The Listeners the week before, and had prepared to tell her, as if this might prompt a writerly dialogue that would bond us together. Just two writers here, talking about our work. I had donut eyes, all swollen and dark from a lack of sleep; my face ghostly as bleached flour. Teaching college students now, I can see that many students look like this; ragged and malnourished, and even if I had said something to Leni, she’d have nodded and long forgotten it by the end of the week. Anyway, the prose in The Listeners was incantatory, hallucinatory, curt and lyrical (“The sidewalks were hard little white seas” ; “She watched a guy drum on a denim thigh some private song”). I’d never read a professor’s work, or any work like this. I slept through most of my classes up until this point, somehow maintaining an A average (I assumed the bar was just low at Portland State). I was hardly reading anything, really, or at least hardly comprehending anything, and this book stung and sliced something open inside of me. In the thick grog of my sleepy state, I felt awake. Needless to say, as soon as I sat down in class, I felt like an imposter and resigned not to say anything at all.
When we first opened the main assigned text for the course, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories edited by Ben Marcus, we overviewed a roster of writers whose stylistic choices far superseded any rudimentary understanding of terms like plot and setting. Garielle Lutz, Sam Lipsyte, Kate Braverman, Brian Evenson, Christine Schutt, and so many more. This book, we learned, would feature stories that weasiled their way into your skin, preferring to harvest the host rather than the other way around. The other students in the room sat with backs erect as yardsticks, nodding along as Leni spoke. In the Anchor introduction, Marcus makes the case for pretending to be asleep after he was read to as a child: “faking sleep after a story ended was the only way to have private time, an afterlude of silence so the story could bloom inside you, and not get ruined by explanations and claims and arguments.”
One of the first stories we read was Christine Schutt’s “You Drive,” the opening story of her 1996 collection Nightwork (her first book, acquired by Gordon Lish at Knopf, and published when she was 47 years old). The story opens with a father and daughter traversing the boundaries of one another’s skin while sitting in a car, immediately rendering the taboo subject of incest into a twisted romantic dance with snaking, complex syntax. You can see the opening sentence tacked above, how it swerves as a car heading toward a cliff. I fell headfirst into her work after this story, and not because of the content, but because of the style, which is not something I had ever experienced before. Her ear is so astutely attuned to the way sound amplifies meaning, how the precision of her sentences often evoke the very thing they describe (as in a son’s cough, the sound of it echoed in the words and their meaning: “a clattering wagon on its jagged way down”).
Schutt has been writing her entire life, but often struggled to publish or place her work in magazines. A 1976 person rejection from Atlantic Monthly reads, “This is deftly and sensitively written, but oddly shapeless and inconclusive.” In a Paris Review video interview, she recounts someone similarly concluding, “You can write very beautiful sentences and beautiful descriptions, but it may take you 20 years to figure out how to write a story.” Schutt holds a hand against her cheek after she says this, adding, “And I found that devastating.” By happenstance, in her early forties, Gordon Lish needed a new space to hold his master writing classes, and Schutt offered her cramped New York apartment living room. She describes him as taking command of her space as writers began convening there weekly. Lish, she recounts in the same Paris Review interview, “liberated me from this notion of facts and dates and times… Not knowing where you’re going [he said to her] is alright. I didn’t have to lose the thing I knew well, which was language and sentences.” He invigorated her to believe in the work she was always producing. More than plot, her work is often first concerned with mood, and she can cleave a character from a single image, which critics and editors must have found discomfiting. Her work takes time to fully appreciate, and I’d hope so because you can see that each sentence is labored upon and chipped away to its dense essentials. She’s a sculptor of language.
In a post-workshop conference, Leni lent to me an issue of The Believer Magazine with Garielle Lutz’s essay “The Sentence is A Lonely Place.” She said she thought it might outline and affirm some of my own pursuits, as I was so struck by prose that sounded like poetry, that seemed so intensely focused on each individual sentence. And although I was afraid to admit my story was clearly a Frankenstein rip-off of Schutt and Lutz, I felt like she saw something in me (like she saw that I might have something to say). I immediately poured over the essay, half-entranced, standing in the hallway still close enough she could probably hear me reading. By way of introducing Schutt’s work, Lutz writes, “The aim of the literary artist, I believe, is to initiate the process by which the words in a sentence no longer remain strangers to each other but begin to acknowledge one another’s existence and do more than tolerate each other’s presence in the phrasing: the words have to lean on each other, rub elbows, rub off on each other, feel each other up.” The kind of reader who Schutt writes for, Lutz calls a page-hugger rather than a page-turner; the kind of reader who can appreciate and understand that there is nothing random on the page. It is a belabored work of art.
Pouring through various interviews with Schutt, she’s often asked about two things: why she writes the way that she does and how. While much of her work features run-on, curving sentences that render character, place, and purpose simultaneously (see above), her style is often lumped in with minimalism. “The minimalist style,” she says in response to a question of why, “is borne of my determination to avoid received, worn, cliched language in order to write originally. This means many sentences are struck out for being dull, for being in service of no more than moving a character like a chair, for saying the obvious in the same old, obvious way. ‘She froze.’ To talk about somebody freezing as a way of suggesting surprise or horror or shock seems to me the laziest of practices.” It’s not surprising that Matt Bell named a revision exercise after her in his recent book on craft Refuse To Be Done, The Christine Schutt Challenge, in which he asks writers to write the absolute best, most unimpeachable sentences they can. Schutt often brings her methods back to Lish. In an interview with Tinge Magazine, she says, “Again, a lesson from Gordon Lish, whose method is to write one sentence strong enough to live by, and then to query this same sentence for its most powerful or interesting or provocative word. In the next sentence you either embrace the word or reject that same term, and so then you move on, sentence by sentence.”
In the Tiny Cabinet, I have re-typed a selection of Schutt’s sentences, taken out of context to see their magnitudes, their poetry, the distillation of character and story in single images that often present the world askance though Scutt’s singular vision. I understand there’s a kind of violence in tearing apart a text like this, by slicing and stabbing a sentence (or two) to stand on its own, naked in a way it doesn’t belong. If I could, I’d papier-mâché every page from all of her books here, but there isn’t space, and each sentence would be lost among the rest. I conceived of displaying her sentences in the way one might pin insects to see them in a way we usually don’t, the way a sentence usually skitters off into the next, lost in the oceanic pull of the larger body of text. This is what often happens with prose. Scutt’s work is so cleanly whittled, so cleaved of excess, it’s no wonder Kirkus Review said of the stories in Nightwork, they are seen as “sliced a little too thin—and admittedly close to the bone.” In their sharpness, the sentences are often violent in their own right, rankled by despair and unease, shaved down to the core essence. I don’t think it’s often we see writing on display the same way we do, say, photography, and I know it’s partially because of context, but often Schutt’s whole story can be seen in the individual sentences of which they are made.
Ever since my first fiction workshop, I’ve often carried around a book of Schutt’s (Prosperous Friends and Florida are my favorites), namely as a reminder of what is possible in fiction and that obscurity and difference shouldn’t stop a writer from making something interesting, something new, something a reader might have to work hard to understand. I can’t say that I always live up to the unimpeachable quality of sentences in my own work, but I think about Schutt’s advice a lot, and I’m glad she continues to write fiction despite so many early voices not knowing what to do with her work. If I hadn’t taken that workshop with Leni Zumas, I might not be here, still writing, finishing my MFA today.
-Tyler Sowa
