All Souls [Paperback]

There aren't any descriptions of tranquil happy school years, those "good old golden rule days" are prehistoric in Christine Schutt's spot on story of the students, parents, and teachers at Manhattan's Siddons School for Girls. A New York prep school teacher herself Schutt well knows of what she writes, and she does so with always delicate, sometimes sparse yet revelatory prose. Characters are displayed to a farthing in snippets of conversation or thoughts.

At the center of the story is Astra Dell, a senior class girl who is suffering from a rare form of cancer. She is that "pale girl...the dancer with all the hair, the red hair, knotted or braided or let to fall to her waist, a fever, and she consumed."
Her father is scarcely able to cope with his beloved daughter's illness. He longs for Grace, his late wife who was killed in an auto accident. Despite Astra's suffering, knowing his sorrow, it is she who tries to console him.

Carlotta Forestal, known as Car, is Astra's best friend. Car has an eating problem, devoting the tense meals shared with her mother to simply pushing and mashing the food on her plate. She has a retreat - her father's apartment to which she has a key. She would go there simply to wander about and phone. It is there that she can light a cigarette and "ash it on the table." Mr. Forestal had an unlisted number and her mother didn't know it, so she was safe. Car thinks of Astra and writes frequent notes to her, which are added to the surfeit of good wishes, balloons and flowers that decorate her hospital room.

Another who often thinks of Astra is Marlene Kovak who visits her often, and pens lengthy letters to her. These missiles are sometimes single spaced and three pages long. Marlene will sit in a corner of the school lounge, listening, taking notes, all to be relayed to Astra. A misfit among the daughters of wealth Marlene is an enigma. She attends Siddons solely because her mother, Theta, borrowed money to keep her there. Theta works in a dentist's office to maintain their modest home and make payments on her debt. Theta is as out of place among the mothers as Marlene is among the students, most of whom are economically privileged and emotionally deprived.

Some other soon to graduate students are Alex and Suki, best friends, who yearn to be party girls and whose college acceptance is assured thanks to family wealth. Although in a group they often engage in sub rosa conversations. As obsessed as they are with their own futures they, too, are affected by Astra's illness, remembering that she came back to school the day after her mother's funeral and agreeing, "She's perfect."

Add to this mix the teachers, specifically Anna Mazur who had come to New York from Michigan seeking "sophistication and experience." She found neither, is attracted to Tim Weeks, the most popular teacher at Siddons, and continuously confuses the names of two black girls. When asked, "Do we all look alike, Miss Mazur?" The thought is "The problem was the girls did look alike."

Another faculty member is Dr. Meltzer, "a fat man who smelled like the movies." After a mishap in class, he screams at a girl, "Who do you think you are?" The reply is "A Du Pont."

This is the world Schutt invites us to enter, and it is a fascinating one peopled with finely wrought characters and quite memorable.

- Gail Cooke

Schutt is a master of the incidental, those small moments, some brittle, some brilliant, revealing the human psyche in all its flaws; the briefest glimpse of what we conceal from others, is here exposed. The author brings a fresh, incisive perspective to this novel, in this case the rarified environment of the Siddons School in Manhattan's Upper East Side. To be sure, these students are privileged, their world barely marred by the harsh reality that plagues the less well off. Their sensibilities honed on the classics, diverse languages and the experiences of world travel, these senior girls grapple with which colleges to attend and the angst of bidding farewell to the sheltered years of their expensive education. Through the mysterious illness (an obscure cancer?) that has struck one of the most popular students, Astra Dell, a particular poignancy imbues the novel. The elegant Astra, with her sheaf of glowing red hair, is a symbol of Siddons perfection, struck down by the cruel blow of an indifferent fate.

Astra's slow fall into devastating illness is solemnly monitored by Mr. Dell, his wife lost to a freak accident before Astra's illness; he longs for his wife's certitude and comfort in this grueling time, as he watches his daughter's slender form evaporate under the attack of the disease that can only be fought by extreme measures. Her spare hospital room a testament to the magnitude of the battle, a table is filled with cards bearing well wishes from classmates, a gentle chorus of "get well soon" and "we miss you" crushed by the violence of harsh treatments, as painful and ominous as Astra's disease. It is the haunting voices of these others, classmates, teachers, that create the narrative beyond Astra's hospital bed. It is difficult to allocate emotion to Astra's suffering in lives fraught with the petty dramas of adolescence on the cusp of a new beginning.

A lonely female teacher visits with the students' favorite bachelor teacher. Over the months, Anna Mazur hopes for more, but he clings to the constraints of friendship. Marlene Kovacs, who never fit in with the other girls, is a regular visitor, compelled to return to Astra's bedside, giving in to impulsive theft, letters from Astra's best friend, Car. In a fugue state of her own, Car Forester pens truths that transcend the usual discourse that passes for encouragement, mirroring Astra's dilemma in a frail grasp of life's daily disappointments. Pregnant with the egocentric imaginations of teenaged girls who cannot forget Astra, the characters are increasingly drawn to the demands of approaching graduation. Isolated in the unique self-centeredness of Astra's friends and acquaintances, the pall of death hovers, a shadow of what the world has so far only hinted at, one girl's easy journey through privilege shattered by a random stroke of fate. In this place, truth flickers like a candle. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

I just read about All Souls in the NYTBR this past weekend and read it this week -- it was really riveting, great writing, an intricate web of a story. The self interestedness was made really compelling. Good book.