All Souls (novel)

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All Souls
All Souls (Schutt novel).jpg
Author Christine Schutt
Country United States
Publication date
2008

All Souls is a 2008 novel by American writer Christine Schutt. The book takes place in New York City, and follows the lives of faculty and students at the fictional Siddons School. [1]

Contents

Writing and composition

The novel draws from Schutt's experience as a teacher at an all-girls school in Manhattan. [2] Since the book's publication, Schutt noted "types" from the school, Nightingale-Bamford, she would include if she were to rewrite it. [3]

All Souls was in part inspired by David Malouf's novel Remembering Babylon . [2] Despite perception that the novel "[pushes] the boundaries of fiction" [4] Schutt has said she did not intend for it to do so. [3]

Plot

The novel follows Astra Dell and her classmates at Siddons School over the course of their senior year.

Reception

Critical reception

Maud Casey, writing for the New York Times , referred to the novel as "refreshingly strange". [4] Casey compared the novel favorably to the work of Virginia Woolf, whose novels Schutt references in All Souls. [4] Publishers Weekly criticized Schutt for not "[doing] enough with the familiar prep school setting to make the story resonate". [5]

In a review of Schutt's depiction of marriages, David Winters referred to the book's omniscient narrator as "[...] lending a sense of distance" to the novel, in contrast with her earlier Nightwork, which featured first person narration. [6]

Honors

All Souls was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. [7] [8]

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References

  1. Knight, Michael (30 April 2019). "On the Literary Pitfalls of Writing About the Young and Rich". LitHub. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  2. 1 2 Unferth, Deb Olin (1 May 2009). "Correspondence with Christine Schutt". Believer Magazine (62). Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  3. 1 2 Burke, Michelle Y. (14 October 2012). "An Interview with Christine Schutt | HTMLGIANT". htmlgiant.com. HMTLGiant. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  4. 1 2 3 Casey, Maud (29 August 2008). "My So-Called Death (Published 2008)". The New York Times. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  5. "All Souls". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  6. Winters, David (19 December 2012). "Difficult Intimacies: Christine Schutt's Dark Portraits of Marriage". Los Angeles Review of Books. The Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  7. "Finalist: All Souls, by Christine Schutt (Harcourt)". www.pulitzer.org. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  8. Charles, Charles (20 November 2012). "Book World: It's unhappily ever after in Christine Schutt's 'Prosperous Friends'". The Washington Post. Retrieved 29 December 2020.