Christine Schutt’s second novel All Souls centers on the girls attending Siddons, a ritzy Manhattan all-girls private school.

The tenuous axis of All Souls is Astra Dell and her struggle with a rare cancer. While most novels tend to either romanticize or to dramatize cancer, Schutt is brutally honest in her depictions. “People make the most impact on the lives of others by being absent,” Astra’s best friend Car Forestal said. Despite Astra’s central role, she appears infrequently; when we actually see her, she’s usually sleeping. Astra’s importance lies not in her personal struggles but in how she forces others around her to face facets of their personalities they usually ignore. For example, Mr. Weeks, a teacher at Siddons, realizes that “I don’t want to put myself in a situation where I have to experience death or loss” — a personality trait that no one wants to admit to. His interaction with her forces him to that realization.

Beyond the relationships between characters, Schutt’s trademark poetic prose uses the brutal economy of words themselves to push the novel along. Although the novel is loosely broken into nine chapters, each chapter is further subdivided into sections with titles such as “Mothers,” “Suki and Alex” or “Siddons” each told from the perspective of a different character. The result creates a fragmented story that echoes Schutt’s writing style — “Mr. Dell, in his daughter’s room, stuck his face into the horn of a stargazer lily, one of a ... one of a ... must have been a dozen, and he breathed in and said wasn’t that something.”

All Souls flits from character to character, introducing a wide cast ranging from Suki and Alex, the beautiful girls “distinguished by their slender bodies and their disregard for their bodies;” Marlene, “the dirty girl;” and anorexic Car Forestal. Schutt isn’t afraid to delve into the dark, jagged sides of her characters. She portrays them honestly. Marlene “often shamed herself into high feeling ... she picked at herself and made worse scabs.” Miss Wilkes, a teacher at Siddons, pursues a forbidden lesbian relationship with Lisa, the “nice girl” who asserts that “she had them fooled.” Car, a wannabe writer, realizes that “the trouble with writing at age 17 was [she] already knew her work was juvenilia.” Schutt allows her characters to blossom and flower through concise, pithy descriptions. Yet because the story shifts relentlessly from character to character, by the time the reader grows accustomed to a voice, Schutt has already moved on. This creates a swift pace that boldly strikes deeper into the heart of the story.

The novel’s greatest strength is also its weakness. At a mere 240 pages, we have room only to brush the surface of these characters; the novel feels rushed, leaving the reader wanting more. Yet it is the lack of depth that allows the book to be less about the individual and more about the tight-knit community surrounding Simmons. Ultimately, it is that sense of community that makes All Souls a worthwhile read.

is Christine Schutt, who previously exploded onto the literary scene with her debut Florida, which picked up a 2004 National Book Award nomination. In her latest, All Souls is a faint echo of the Gossip Girl series; apartments are described as “mahogany and damask ... double sconces, elaborate molding, herringbone floors.” Girls get into Ivy League schools not because of achievement but because “there are practically buildings named after you there.” Both of Schutt’s novels delve into the relationship between women, intimately baring the insecurities of the characters, and she has been rewarded - All Souls was chosen as a Pulitzer Finalist.

Interested in buying this? Support Writing.Com by making your purchase of All Souls   from Amazon.Com!

Created Jul 10, 2009 at 2:58pm • Submit your own review...