Bang, Bang, Bang: On the Short Fiction of Christine Schutt

by Gavin Thomson

Christine Schutt’s short stories tend to be quite short: quick stabs to the gut that draw jets of blood. In “The Blood Jet,” a 2000-word story from her second collection, A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer (2005), the narrator, a mother, reflects on her relationship with the bad man for whom she left her husband. She reflects, too, on how her relationship with this man forever fractured her relationship with her daughters, with herself, with life. “The Blood Jet” (the phrase is Plath’s) is made of pains acutely felt and clearly recalled. Only one fairly traditional, though still characteristically swift and pared-down, scene occurs: along with a real estate agent, the bad man ushers the narrator to the house of a woman murdered recently by her husband. In the walls are bullet holes. A few sentences later and the narrator and the bad man are on the “front lawn in full sun fighting.” Meanwhile, the real estate agent, locked afraid inside her car, leans on her horn. From the beginning of “The Blood Jet,” we understand that the relationship between the bad man and the narrator neither began nor ended well. Later, we learn the police intervened.

The narrator of “The Blood Jet,” like women in many other stories by Schutt, aches for money and nice things, and trades fist blows for crisp bills. For bills she depends on the bad man. The bad man says her husband was smart to trade her in. He says to her, “So waah, waah, waah about money.” He says, “No one cares about you. You think you’re pretty? Look again.”

Why doesn’t she leave him? She thinks their romance, or rather their lack of it, is experience. Plus, he has money, and “money gentles everything.” But money for her comes at the cost of his cruelty. He says to her, “Where’s your wallet, cunt?” when they both know her wallet is at home and empty, as usual. Secretly she thinks him “coarsely born.” She prefers old money and good taste. She and Schutt’s other women tend to prefer easy men in pearly colors, however cruel, chatting calmly in summerhouse sunrooms. They prefer stony estates, cold stones on a terrace, and green bars of soap cracked by age like “saved stones.” Perhaps they aspire to be Lowells.

Yet some settle. The narrator of “The Blood Jet” settles. The bad man has no teardrop chandelier in his dining room, no shoehorn in his foyer. He has space-age lamps with “saucered hoods.” He’s nothing like a Lowell. He’s a fraud. He lies about having an ex-wife, Amy. There is no Amy. He lies, too, about having a moneyed past. He’s nouveau riche. His taste betrays him. The rich men he treats are his clients, not his friends—though, of course, he pretends otherwise.

And the narrator hates her life. She hates everyone. She and the bad man: a match made in misanthropy. She makes excuses: “He said horrible things, but I said worse.” She should know better. She does know better. So why doesn’t she act better? She ought never have let the bad man into her home. She knows this. She ought never have let him meet her daughters. His daughter, who according to him is pretty, unlike the narrator, is another one of his fabrications. When the boy who might be his son phones, the bad man says to him, “you little fuck,” and demands he not call again. The narrator’s own children, two daughters from her marriage, hate the bad man. They hate her too, even more. They have moved out of her house, into their grandmother’s house, and her eldest refuses to see her. But the bad man is fond of her youngest and favorite, Cissy, so she arranges rare outings for the three of them. At one of these outings, the bad man spoon-feeds Cissy whipped cream from a sundae and calls her “Stupid Puss.” When he fucks the narrator, he calls her Amy. What does the narrator call him?

I called him nothing; he was as he was. His torso was creased from the folds of his bellies, and his unmuscled legs rasped walking. He moved slowly yet sweated; even newly ironed, the armpits of his shirts smelled sharply, and the strained seams of his worn pants advertised his ass, his hairy ass now heavy in motion, thrusting. I was dumbed to saying nothing, to calling him nothing but a cock, a very big cock. What else could you call that red trumpeting thing he slapped across my face?

You could call that red trumpeting thing by any other name, but none would slap so hard, or leave such a mark. Schutt’s carnal details here, alongside her lilting alliterations, her consonants clunked together like cold stones, her rhetorical questions, and her patterned vowels—these comprise the architecture, or at least the blueprints, of her inimitable style. They also hint at why reading her stories feels like clothing a chronic sore with a fine fabric. “Think of a starchy collar against a sunburnt neck,” says the narrator of “The Blood Jet.” Think of this when you think of Schutt’s short fiction. “Think of poisonous solvents that smoke through cloth.”

The bad man in “The Blood Jet” gifts the narrator rubies. Sometimes for no reason he gifts her shirts with “papery labels” that seem “glued on” and then for no reason tosses these shirts in the trash. He flaunts his “full-deck-thick clipped wad of money and the diamond his mother once wore on her hand,” and he says they could be hers, if she behaves. She salivates for the folds of his belly. She kneels for his red trumpeting thing. At the vacant house of the murdered wife, he threatens to murder her. So do it already. “The Blood Jet” ends:

Do it! Do it! Do it! was my heart—is still my heart when I think of him, and I think of him. I wonder at that tin-bright vision, that acidic bite of spit, that embrace, that poetry by which I live.

Tin-bright, acidic poetry is what Schutt writes. “Think of poisonous solvents that smoke through cloth.” Before they appear in her collections, many (if not most) of Schutt’s stories appear in NOON, where she works as consulting editor. The head editor of NOON, Diane Williams, also writes tin-bright sentences that smoke through cloth. Williams and Schutt are, not coincidentally, disciples of Gordon Lish. Another Lish disciple, Gary Lutz, says in his essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” “there are few who have regularly achieved what I am calling an intra-sentence intimacy with more exquisiteness and grace than Christine Schutt.” Lutz plucks a thorny four-word bouquet from “The Blood Jet”: “acutely felt, clearly flat.” In this almost anagrammatic phrase, Lutz observes, “the second of the two phrases contains the alphabetic DNA of the first,” and the words “do more than tolerate each other’s presence in the phrasing: the words . . . lean on each other, rub elbows, rub off on each other, feel each other up.” There’s a lot of feeling each other up in Schutt’s sentences and stories, a lot of starchy collars against sunburns, and sunburns against mouths, and mouths against red trumpeting things.

There’s a lot of incest, too. The first story in Schutt’s first collection, Nightwork, begins:

She brought him what she had promised, and they did it in his car, on the top floor of the car park, looking down onto the black flat roofs of buildings, and she said, or she thought she said, “I like your skin,” when what she really liked was the color of her father’s skin, the mottled white of his arms and the clay color of her father’s skin, the mottled white of his arms and the clay color at the roots of the hairs along his arms.

Here the words do more than feel each other up. They taste of father’s arm hair.

Due to the cruelty and incest in Schutt’s work, some writers—there are surprisingly few who have written about her work—have glued the label “dark” to the fine fabric of her prose. Dark! What a worthless label. Toss it in the trash. And besides, what one considers dark and nightmarish is another’s normal nighttime. Such is the case in Schutt’s nightmarish (and more allegorical than usual) story from Nightwork, “Dead Men.” Here a woman nightly fucks a living man, whose name she doesn’t know, on top of her bed, while below remains a man who’s dead. She can’t let the living man know about the dead man. If he knew, he might leave. When he was still alive, the dead man said to her, “You could take my fist, you cunt,” and she did. And thanks to what he did to her when alive, she is little more now than “a sore, a hole, a blankness,” which the living man “must try to strike.” (The sentiment brings to mind a lyric by Townes Van Zandt: “We all got holes to fill / them holes are all that’s real.”) There is nothing the living man can do to her but that she could, and does, take. Her secret appetite is insatiable. More, more, oh please more more more. Meanwhile, the dead man remains below her bed, ashen yet ablaze, dead but not to her.

The mothers in Schutt’s stories also haunt on top and below beds. They let themselves be seen coming in and out of beds and bathrooms, rim wineglasses with lipstick, leave hair everywhere about the house, and tell their children about the men they’ve fucked. They touch their children where children ought not be touched. One mother, in bed with her son, teaches him how to kiss. When her son’s thumbnail is “rucked and milky,” she tongues “the whorled thumb pad.”

Schutt’s mothers fail to shield their children from the bad men in their lives. One mother keeps a man in the house who fondles her daughters and who takes her son to a greenhouse and leaves him “bleedy at the spigot.” When a daughter in a different story confesses to her mother that one of her mother’s former boyfriends taught her and her friend how to kiss with tongue, her mother says to her, “You probably are smarter for it.” What the daughter doesn’t tell her mother is she used to lick the bad man’s shoes below the kitchen table. Once again, as in “Dead Men,” the unspeakable thing, the most meaningful thing, takes place below what others see.

Or perhaps the mother does see her daughter lick the bad man’s shoe and is only pretending she doesn’t? Perhaps she sees and knows better than she lets on? Schutt’s mothers know better. So why don’t they act better? From “The Blood Jet”:

Once in the beginning, before the neighbors, before the cops, he met us at the zoo. Cissy, I think, suspected he was coming, or something like him, something large and wheezing and hairy. Cissy, as a child, was open arms to anybody, but when he made to speak, she cried for me to lift her.

Why didn’t I take my child to me and run?

In her most recent collection, Pure Hollywood, Schutt’s story arcs are more at ease, more confident, and her occasionally claustrophobic style, which at times reminds me of a closet too cluttered with gorgeous clothing, allows in more air and light. Her natural register feels more natural. From one story in Pure Hollywood: “She turns a knife in her hands and looks hard at this Ridge and then through the boy to the woods again and their neighbor’s field of brown stalks and burst pods, gone-by, tangled aster.” This sentence accelerates polysyndetically forward and then jerkily slows with three asyndetic (and almost anagrammatic) stomps on the brakes. What Lutz calls Schutt’s “intra-sentence intimacy” is here like an orifice that gapes and then tightens; like “a sore, a hole, a blankness,” which can, and does, take in more than before.

Schutt has so far published three story collections: Nightwork (1996), A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer (2005), and Pure Hollywood (2018). She has also published three novels: Florida (2005), All Souls (2008), and Prosperous Friends (2012). She is queenly crowned with literary laurels. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the winner of an O. Henry Prize, and the winner of a Pushcart Prize. But she was never the sort of wunderkind who earns such accolades while puffing spitty joints in college dorms. In a short video interview for “My First Time,” a series on Paris Review’s The Daily, Schutt says that when she attended Columbia University for her MFA, where she now teaches, her instructors tended to her give her the same feedback. “You can write very beautiful sentences,” they said, “and beautiful descriptions, but it may take you twenty years to figure out how to do a story.” In 1976 Schutt received from the Atlantic Monthly a rejection letter that said more or less the same:

Dear Christine Schutt,

This is deftly and sensitively written, but oddly shapeless and inconclusive. We’ll have to return it, but I hope you’ll try us again.

After receiving this (positive) rejection letter, Schutt did indeed take exactly twenty years to publish her first book, Nightwork. In between, she says in her video interview, she wrote and taught and had babies. She was also in a “very abusive relationship” with a bad man—they eventually divorced—and he not only mocked her ceaselessly; he also mocked her work. But although she believed his criticisms of her, she didn’t believe his criticisms of her prose. Nor did she believe he believed his criticisms of her prose. After they got divorced, Schutt says in the interview, she thought no one could hurt her, not anymore.

She met Gordon Lish. He hosted courses and workshops at her apartment in Manhattan. He taught her not to dwell on facts and dates, and that not knowing where you’re going, when writing fiction, is okay. Before meeting Lish, Schutt says she couldn’t rove through the dark without trampling to death what she did so well: “language and sentences.” After meeting Lish, she learned to rove with grace. She pushed her desk to a new place in her apartment and she wrote until four in the morning—hence the title of her first collection, Nightwork.

In his essay “Not-Knowing,” Donald Barthelme says a writer is someone who, “embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.” Barthelme says, “The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning engendered by not knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.” My guess is Schutt’s sentences have always moved in unanticipated directions, through dark, but that it wasn’t until she met Gordon Lish that she figured out how to have her stories move likewise, without losing their shape, or being oddly inconclusive.

Regardless, her stories all but murder me. They push a finger to my head and say, “Bang, bang, bang.” So do it already. “Do it!” says my heart when I read her work. “Do it! Do it! Do it!” More, more, more.

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Gavin Thomson completed his MFA (Fiction) at Columbia, where he was a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow. He’s at work on his first novel.