Florida

Rating:
Summary: Elegant but slight
Review: A series of reminiscences and sketches rather than a novel. Alice's father is killed when she is is five (or seven, I wasn't sure). Her mother has obnoxious lovers and suffers a vaguely described mental illness which results, for some reason, in her spending years in a mental hospital. Alice is brought up largely by her aunt and uncle and spends time living with her decrepit grandmother.
Alice seems lonely (no school friends are ever described) and forms bonds with the family chauffeur and and her English teacher, who both die. (I was reminded a little of Lemony Snicker's disaster-prone Beaudelaire children). Later she connects up again with her mother. Alice's boy friend resembles one of her mother's, and parallels are drawn between the behaviors of the three generations. She never talks to any of her mother's doctors or discusses her diagnosis and treatment.
As an account of growing up with a mentally ill mother it suffered in my estimation because I had recently read Virginia Holman's superb "Rescuing Patty Hearst." There is some fine poetic writing, perhaps overly poetic. The opulent surroundings in the Midwest and Arizona are well described but I felt that the wealth of the characters detracted from realism. Everyone is filthy rich. They make their money the old-fashioned way; they inherit it. They drift in a never-never land, where money problems may involve the dreadful prospect of selling great grandmama's pearls.
It's only 156 pages, eked out with blank pages and single sentence chapters. It seems that this is a graceful and elegant literary short story writer who has yet to make the transition to the major leagues.


Rating:
Summary: A rite of passage
Review: In blissful prose that demands attention, Schutt is ruthless, brutal and passionate, as she tells the story of a motherless daughter. From the beginning I am in tears, so deeply does this small novel reach into the hidden places of my heart. Even while the author's transcendent words fill me, my mind reaches to my own mother, in her final days railing against a world she refused to relinquish.

Alice, namesake daughter, is a child born to survive her environment, with a mother who seeks emotional safety in confinement to a sanatorium. There follows a series of homes, but never one of her own and a need to find comfort in a world bereft of comfort, after her father's death and mother's virtual abandonment.

In her ensuing sleep-over life, little Alice must always ask, "may I...?", remain unobtrusive, be pliant, flattering. Moving from her Uncle Billy and Aunt Frances' possession-filled, strict-ruled, child-proofed home to her Nonna's luxurious estate, Alice spills her heart out to an old woman who can barely move, rendered speechless by a stroke. Her sleep-over life motherless and rudderless, Alice grows up with a vengeance, scraping a private existence from the leftovers of others.

Meeting her mother again later in California, the two women move cautiously around each other. In prose that reads like poetry, Alice describes this mother in a series of stark, hurtful observations and the realities of her own life as the generations turn full circle, Alice the woman, a mother almost indistinguishable from the silent Nonna.

Women of a certain age, and there are many, will find this part of the novel exquisitely painful, full of recognition. Florida reflects a validation of women, their ability to survive the direst of circumstances. Here is understanding for the terrible errors made by family, both intentional and unintentional. In the end, Alice's mother is "an old woman, made innocent". So are they all, their frail bones leached of ill intentions, forgiven by years of attrition. This slight book contains the experience of a lifetime, ridged with sorrows and shallow joys too meager to squander. Florida is a rite of passage and an exorcism of grief; I am in awe of this author's talents. Luan Gaines/2004.