cover image Styll in Love

Styll in Love

Rob Schultz, Robert Schultz. Van Neste Books, $24 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-9657639-0-5

Better titled ""In Love with Style,"" this debut is bedeviled from its first sentence by prose so overwrought, self-conscious and clumsy that it smothers all but the rudiments of plot and character. Abandoned by his young wife, Constance, and their infant son, the emotionally anesthetized Styll embarks on an anatomy of love, which he identifies with death. His narcissistic project is threatened when he falls in love with the lawyer (a moonlighting witch with a talking pigeon) whom he hires in the battle for custody of his son. The banal and fantastic intermingle as Styll and his earth-mother savior--a feminist of indeterminate age and predictably well-preserved good looks--consummate their love and, leaving behind all worldly encumbrances (kid included), head off into the sunset. It would be bad enough if Schultz's narrator were the only one addicted to symbols, portents and cliches, but his characters all speak the same dialect, a mishmash of New Age pieties dressed up in nonsense. The author should be cautioned that style alone does not a novel make. (May) FYI: Styll in Love is Van Neste's inaugural publication; a second book will follow in September. The press was started by Karen Van Neste Owen, the wife of novelist Howard Owen.