Florida - Hardcover

Schutt, Christine

3.7

635 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810151502 ISBN 13: 9780810151505

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2004

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Finalist for the 2004 National Book Award Florida is the portrait of the artist as a young woman, an orphan's story full of loss and wonder, a familiar tale told in original language. Alice Fivey, fatherless at age seven, is left in the care of her relatives at ten when her love-wearied mother loses custody of her and submits to the sanitarium and years of psychiatric care. A namesake daughter locked in the orphan's move-around life, she must hold still while the seamstress pins her into someone not her mother. But they share the same name, so she is her mother, isn't she? Alice finds consolation in books and she herself is a storyteller who must build a home for herself word by right word. Florida is her story, recalled in brief scenes of spare beauty and strangeness as Alice moves from house to house, ever further from the desolation of her mother's actions, ever closer to the meaning of her experience. In this most elegiac and luminous novel, Schutt gives voice to the feast of memory, the mystery of the mad and missing, and above all, the life-giving power of language.

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Review:

"This is a portrait of bravery and this is the portrait of an artist. When Schutt grinds her pen against the ground, we expect it to bleed." --Diane Williams, author of Romancer Erector
"Christine Schutt's sad and funny novel of a little girl adrift amid a group of childish adults has the same brilliancy of close observation that distinguished her collection of stories Nightwork. Everything the child sees is unstable, but the fixed intensity of her gaze grounds her chaotic home life and almost confers a logic on it. Florida is an amazing achievement."

--John Ashbery

"Writing with razor-sharp observation, in Florida Christine Schutt has created an admirably precise, spare, and yet detailed portrait of the contingencies that give rise to a young girl's anguish and her stubborn endurance against all odds."
--Lydia Davis, author of Samuel Johnson is indignant

From the Back Cover:

"Beautiful and . . . elegantly wry, this story of an abandoned girl . . . is also the story of storytelling-and how it develops as a means to order one's disordered world."--The Believer
Set in the Midwest, where Florida represents a faraway paradise, this elegiac and luminous novel tells the story of Alice Fivey. Her father long gone and her mother--whose "toenails winked in the foil bed we knew for Florida"--newly institutionalized, Alice is left in the care of relatives at age ten. While others try to mold her into someone different from her mother, she consoles herself with books and becomes a storyteller herself until, moving into adulthood, she finds the meaning of her own experience.
Told in brief scenes of spare beauty, Florida is a graceful and gripping tale of family, forgiveness, and creation of the self. In what John Ashbery called "an amazing achievement" and Mary Gordon dubbed "a wholly original endeavor," Christine Schutt gives voice to the feast of memory, the mystery of the mad and missing, and the power of words.
"Schutt's subjects--love, family, death--are not new, but her lush, spilling style is fresh. This slender book grows plump on language."--Newsday
"The luxury of this debut novel is its rich, descriptive language. It's harnessed with powerful simplicity."--The Christian Science Monitor
Christine Schutt is the author of the short-story collections Nightwork and A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer. Her work, which has garnered an O. Henry Prize and a Pushcart Prize, is published widely in literary journals. Schutt lives and teaches in New York City.

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