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Victorine (New York Review Books Classics)

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Author: Maude Hutchins
Creator: Terry Castle
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$14.95~~
Buy New: $3.99
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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

1 reviews
Sales Rank: 283541

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 208
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5 x 0.6

ISBN: 1590172701
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781590172704
ASIN: 1590172701

Publication Date: August 19, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
Victorine is thirteen, and she can’t get the unwanted surprise of her newly sexual body, in all its polymorphous and perverse insistence, out of her mind: it is a trap lying in wait for her at every turn (and nowhere, for some reason, more than in church). Meanwhile, Victorine’s older brother Costello is struggling to hold his own against the overbearing, mean-spirited, utterly ghastly Hector L’Hommedieu, a paterfamilias who collects and discards mistresses with scheming abandon even as Allison, his wife, drifts through life in a narcotic daze.

And Maude Hutchins’s Victorine? It’s a sly, shocking, one-of-a-kind novel that explores sex and society with wayward and unabashedly weird inspiration, a drive-by snapshot of the great abject American family in its suburban haunts by a literary maverick whose work looks forward to—and sometimes outstrips—David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and the contemporary paintings of Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin.

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars

Pretty in pink August 27, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Maude Hutchins's beautifully bizarre coming of age novel is so unusual it paradoxically seems to invite constant comparisons to describe what it might be like: Terry Castle invokes Douglas Sirk in her introduction to this very welcome NYRB re-edition, and the jacket mentions David Lynch and Ivy Compton-Burnett. One might also think of a collision between the worlds of Booth Tarkington and Ronald Firbank; but even this juxtaposition would not fully capture the oddity of this extravagant tale. Victorine is the only daughter of a wealthy philandering manufacturer and his invalid dreamy wife sometimes in the early part of the twentieth century, and lives in their large house with her ephebe-like older brother Costello and her strange cherubic younger brother Dennis. True to her name, she lives in an odd dreamworld that is hypereroticized in many ways even as she seems unaware of the potential sexual threats all around her, both from town transients and from the strangely obsessed Costello. The atmosphere in this dreamy hothouse (repeatedly described in all its pinks, roses, violets, and purples) is both thickly perfumed and electric with erotic energy; yet even when explosions occur (and they do) they hardly change it much at all. There doesn't seem anything else quite like this in American fiction. The edition's introduction is very informative about Hutchins's sensational life, although it is to be regretted Castle feels it necessary to condescend to Hutchins' writing.

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