Schutt. Christine. All Souls. Orlando: Harcourt, 2008.

This is a novel about an 18-year-old girl who is sick with cancer that I've devoured over the past two days, while simultaneously attending the Sewanee Writers' Conference and listening over the phone to the news of my friend Sarah dying of cancer. Who has died of cancer (how terrible that sudden use of the past tense). It's been for me a very important book to have at arm's reach. Here's how I got to buying it.

Schutt's my reader here, which means she is the one faculty member who has read my manuscript closely enough to lead discussion on it in class and sit with me one on one to talk about it in specific and writing in general. She also has given arguably the best reading at the conference so far, despite the fact that it was in the late afternoon, as opposed to the more high-profile readings in the evening, after dinner. For better or for worse, American Letters is one of the last cultural realms in this country that suffers (I think the word apt) from elder worship—so argued A.O. Scott in that "Best Novels of the Past 25 Years" things in the Times a while back—and as Sewanee is entrenched in the south as much as it is in the world of American letters there's elder-worship going on here in spades. Schutt is not a young writer but she certainly is a new one and for me it was very important that she of all the faculty here has most recently been accoladed by national awards. Sewanee's got award-winners everywhere in the faculty, but Schutt's Florida was nominated for the National Book Award in 2005, which was like yesterday, and to me this made her the obvious candidate when trying to figure out who I should study for.

Just because she got a nomination? I mean, she didn't even win. No, it's not that. It's because, and I hear the way this term sounds before I even type it, she's relevant. She's, like, writing now, and that writing she's doing now is unlike what was winning awards many, many years ago.

All Souls is a campus novel—so beloved genre—and concerns itself mostly with the senior girls surrounding Astra, the dying protagonist. And they're girls in full. Schutt, in her reading, called them "feckless girls" and then proceeded to read a section of the novel (each of the nine chapters is divided into titles subsections) about one of these feckless girls, Marlene:

Marlene picked her nose and sent what she found in it flying across the room. She was a dirty girl, she knew that much, and whatever the girls in school suspected her of—stealing, farting, lying—was true. The slut part was not true, although she wished it were, but all the dirty parts—yes, she was that girl. Look at her messy room, the unresolve of such disorder. She had no ambition but to dizzy herself into absence. (12, emphasis added)

I italicized that last line because it leads me to what I love the most about Schutt's writing, which I learned from her over coffee this morning, what has completely changed the way I go about putting a story together, getting from point A to point B. It involves, actually, forgetting about point B all together, but I'm extraordinarily tired, and I just this morning lost a close friend, and so on the off chance that you've come here quickly after my posting, you'll need to return, tomorrow I hope, and get the remainder of it then.