This summer read’s a gem

Wed., July 12, 2006

Review by Cindy Elavsky King Features Syndicate

“A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer” – By Christine Schutt – ($13, Harcourt)

The trouble with reading a book of short stories is the tendency to read it like a novel: straight through, chapter upon chapter. However, in Christine Schutt’s “A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer,” to read each story, one after the next after the next, would be doing the book and yourself a disservice.

Each story is raw and uninhibited, spitting out truths and dares that sometimes leave the reader breathless. To come out of one story and then immediately dive into the next does not allow enough time to recuperate from the previous tale. And the previous story will stay with you, if only as a flicker of thought and emotion in the back of your mind as you move on to the next.

The story “Darkest of All” is about a mother and her teenage boys’ struggles while one son is in a rehabilitation facility for drug abuse. Schutt’s writing is dreamlike, yet grounded, coaxing her characters’ fears to epiphanies about truths they dare not mention.

In “Unrediscovered, Unrenameable,” she delves deep into the mind of a teenage boy’s coming of age while living on an island with his parents and two sisters. No taboo, no “politically incorrect” thought is shied away from, rather it’s shoved at the reader, full-force.

A young wife’s inability to grow into her role as responsible adult is the focus of “Young.” She leads her life in a sea of lies – a sea so filled with deception, unintentional or otherwise, that she herself is in danger of drowning in it.

Each story in Christine Schutt’s second collection of short stories is an uncut jewel: cherished and beautiful, yet possessing the jagged quality that cuts the reader to the bone.

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