Publication Date: March 13, 2018
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Rating: ★★
In 11 captivating tales, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion, to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love, to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story in Pure Hollywood is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn love and hurt.
Schutt gives us sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives, infused with her signature observation and surprise.
Review:
These tales were interesting, but not my cup of tea. I think that half of me went along with the words in these stories, but the other half was confused by the writing. Some sentences I had to go back and read again because I was thinking that I had the wrong word. To me, it looked like some words maybe were repetitive so the author had to use a synonym to make sure it didn’t repeat too much. I think that these actions caused the writing to simply not flow for me. If I have a hard time with a flow of a book, it’s almost always a do not finish situation. However, I just powered through this one to see what each story entailed.
Some of the stories were alright, some of them were just plain dull. I think that this dullness was a contributing factor of the flow of the writing. If there’s nothing interesting going on, and the words don’t make sense, it seems that the dullness would be escalating per story. It was sometimes a struggle to get through. I hate to be so brutally honest, but I was glad that the stories were so short that I could finish them quickly.
I hope next time Christine Schutt just puts her thoughts out on paper without having to change her wording. It was confusing and just difficult to read. I would definitely give her another chance in the future to see if there are differences on how it could be better.
Lacey's Library 