Craft Notes
Seminar in Getting Quickly to the Trouble: First Sentences from Christine Schutt’s Nightwork
1. 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 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 at the roots of the hairs along his arms.
2. I once saw a man hook a walking stick around a woman’s neck.
3. She was out of practice, and he wanted practice, so they started kissing each other, and they called it practicing, this kissing that occused him.
4. I date an old man, a man so old, I am afraid to see what he is like under his clothes.
5. We woke in the parked car aslant in the field Cory’s grandma had found for us to sleep in, turned earth in front of us, almost houses behind, frames and unpoured sidewalks, abandoned machines and wheelbarrows left anywhere in the thin light that was the afternoon light we knew for spring in the country.
6. There is a man on top of her up on the top of the bed, and there is a man under her down under the bed, but the man down there is dead.
7. We enter the attic at the same time, which makes it all the more some awful heaven here, cottony hot and burnished and oddly bare except for her appliances, the parts our mother used to raise herself from the bed.
8. My son is coughing in his sleep next to me in my bed, where he has come to spend what is left of this night.
9. Someone else was in the room, I think–the second wife.
10. The things my son may see living with me–the way the windows darken suddenly in our apartment, the night tipping shut, a lid, such things as have happened with me and men–shame me.
11. I have accidents in the Fifth Avenue kitchen–cuts, falls, scaldings.
12. She wanted to touch the sister’s back as she saw it in the light beyond the door where she stood, breathing through her mouth, a spy on the sister in the sister’s house–yet waited for, welcome.
13. I walk around to the other side of the bed we are sharing, and I put my face up close to hers and say, “Ann, please. Please,” I say, and her eyes open, and Ann sees me, I think, and she says, “Sorry,” in a loud, steady voice, and she knows.
14. She told her daughter as she might a love such things her lover said were best kept secret from a girl.
15. More than any other, you belong here, but what is there to say but what I meant to say and never did?
16. The girls had their own versions of course, which they told, calling her by his name for her, Margaret, saying, “Margaret, we knew your brother. He wasn’t bad.”
17. Oh, that these fervent thoughts we have of our dead would sift into their spirit world and warm them with the truth of how they matter to us still, how they are missed.
Tags: Christine Schutt, first sentences, nightwork
wow this is terrible
This is a great post, and a great book too.
Love this book. Schutt’s sentences (first, last, every sentence between) jar the reader into attention through their disruptions, both on the lingual and the narrative level. I don’t know of many other writers who achieve so much action (again both on the lingual and narrative levels) in each and every sentence. Her and Lutz are masters at that.
Pretty ambivalent about Schutt. There was an article by Gary Lutz “narratives of steep verbal topography” or something like that, in the Believer a while ago, which exemplifies the kind of writing Schutt excels at – this obsession with the way words sound and feel. I get to the point where I feel this is at the cost of meaning. The first lines might be fantastic but you just don’t get the density of meaning in a single sentence from the likes of Schutt and Lutz that you’d get in some other writers. Quite an oversight for a bunch of people allegedly obsessed with the art of the sentence.
Going to give her one last chance with All Souls which seems like her best work from the snippets I’ve seen. Florida I disliked, even if i did appreciate the superficial aesthetic quality of her turns of phrase, while I never finished on Nightwork.
Hi John,
This argument—and arguments like it—and forgive me if I’m making you a strawman on a Saturday afternoon—always seem to pre-suppose some inherent dichotomy between meaning and feeling. Isn’t the “sound and feel of the language” part of getting at meaning? For me as a reader, it definitely is. Such as in the case of a sentence like “She told her daughter as she might a love such things her lover said were best kept secret from a girl.” I definitely have to parse that. It isn’t transparent. And in my parsing I “get at” meaning because I “get at”—and I feel like I almost run myself through a simulation of—the character’s feelings. Part of that sentence’s meaning is in the character’s nervousness, isn’t it? Her frazzled sense of losing the ability to tell who’s good for what, and how she’s maybe afraid of that. I mean, me interpreting things with a word like frazzled—even that, right? Kind of an onomatopoetic word? How much of language, when you dig through it, ends up back at us trying to mimic how the world interacts with our senses? Not an intellectual abstraction of the world, an idea, but an embodied feeling. I don’t think I’ve read the Schutt story that sentence begins; if I have, I’ve forgotten it, so I don’t know what happens next. But I do immediately—purely from the construction of the language—get a specific feeling of the way she is experiencing life. The sentence construction mimics/mirrors/makes the feeling. Is there a better way to do that? I feel like there isn’t, when feeling itself is a construction of understanding the world. And what I want out of a story is to feel the world in another (an Other) way. Not just witness the world as myself. Be a bystander. Seems like there is plenty of world to stand by without me tuning into somebody’s imagination, so shouldn’t there be more to the act of shared imagination?
Have you read Italo Calvino’s essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts”? He paints a pretty compelling case for how the telling and story of storytelling have always gone together. There is some anthropology, some brain science. What I like about the essay is that it’s about intuition, trying to understand the intuition of storytelling. I guess in that regard I don’t think aesthetics are ever “superficial,” in the sense of extraneous surface sheen, and I think what maybe gets misunderstood is that there is no “verbal topography” that isn’t in service of meaning. It’s just there’s a whole lot to mean.
When the way the words sound and feel are linked to the action (take the first sentence in this post for example, how the first few clauses mimic, by their equal length, being on top of a car and looking down the roof of another building at a lower level, and the way the last few clauses snake along sensually so that you can imagine the characters’ caressing arms), it is not a superficial aesthetic quality. It’s just extremely good.
I really like this collection by Schutt. A great example of the Gordon Lish rule of awesome first sentences. One that Lutz, obviously, also excels at.
One of my favorite books. Thanks Kyle. I needed reminding.
I am tired of ‘disruptive’ prose.
Just purchased. Thanks!
Yeah, i agree wholly. I haven’t read that Calvino essay, at least not in a long time, and if I have I’ve forgotten it. At one point there was a fire and a first sentence, and the first sentence drew in; it had to. And what I really dig about these Schutt sentences is that en medias res is an understatement. Their urgency is that of the beginnings of scenes in “Memento”–you’d better figure out where the fuck you are and fast.
Yeah, i agree wholly. I haven’t read that Calvino essay, at least not in a long time, and if I have I’ve forgotten it. At one point there was a fire and a first sentence, and the first sentence drew in; it had to. And what I really dig about these Schutt sentences is that en medias res is an understatement. Their urgency is that of the beginnings of scenes in “Memento”–you’d better figure out where the fuck you are and fast.