Florida

by Schutt, Christine

• ISBN13: 9780810151505
• ISBN10: 0810151502
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-02-13
• Publisher: Triquarterly Books

Summary

Floridais 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.Floridais 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.

Author Biography

Christine Schutt is the author of the novel Florida (Northwestern, 2004), a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award for Fiction, and Nightwork (Dalkey Archive, 2000), a collection of short stories named by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the Times Literary Supplement. Her work, which has garnered an O. Henry Prize and a Pushcart Prize, is published widely in literary journals. Her new short-story collection A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer is forthcoming from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 2005. Schutt lives and teaches in New York City.

Excerpts

One winter afternoon--an entire winter--it was my father who was taking us. Father and Mother and I, we were going to Florida--who knew for how long? I listened in at the breakfast table whenever I heard talk of sunshine. I asked questions about our living there that made them smile. We all smiled a lot at the breakfast table. We ate sectioned fruit capped with bleedy maraschinos--my favorite! The squeezed juice of the grapefruit was grainy with sugar and pulpy, sweet, pink. "Could I have more?" I asked, and my father said sure. In Florida, he said it was good health all the time. No winter coats in Florida, no boots, no chains, no salt, no plows and shovels. In the balmy state of Florida, fruit fell in the meanest yard. Sweets, nuts, saltwater taffies in seashell colors. In the Florida we were headed for the afternoon was swizzled drinks and cherries to eat, stem and all: "Here's to you, here's to me, here's to our new home!" One winter afternoon in our favorite restaurant, there was Florida in our future while I was licking at the foam on the fluted glass, biting the rind and licking sugar, waiting for what was promised: the maraschino cherry, ever-sweet every time.

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Excerpted from Florida by Christine Schutt
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