National Book Award nominee Schutt (Florida
; Nightwork
) writes with startling beauty and frustrating restraint in 11 searing stories that reveal less than they artfully decline to reveal. A young American couple living in England find themselves pulled apart by desire for others (she for an unnamed "girl"; he for no one identified) in "Young"; in "Weather Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful," four college students experiment with drugs and grapple with messy relationships ("[I]n this way it started. She and George. Alice and George. She and Alice and George. She and Alice and George and Sam"). In "Darkest of All," a mother with a carefully maintained over-the-counter drug habit visits her troubled son in rehab; later, getting her back rubbed by her younger, less screwed-up son, she longs for the idyllic days of their youth: "Jean had lifted the wisps of hair from off their baby scalps, marked as the moon, with their stitched plates of bone yet visible, the boys; how often she had thought to break them." In "They Turn Their Bodies Into Spears," a rich octogenarian welcomes his anorexic granddaughter to his island home, witnessing in her the same sadness he saw in her absent mother. Schutt's plots can be thin, but her prose is extraordinary. (June)
