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Victorine
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 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.
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.
191 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1959
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About the author
Maude Hutchins
26 books8 followersMaude Phelps McVeigh Hutchins was an American novelist born in New York City. Hutchins is best known today for her sexual coming-of-age novel Victorine which was republished in 2008 by New York Review Books Classics. Other novels include Blood on the Doves and The Unbelievers Downstairs. She was married to University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins. They married in 1921 and divorced in 1948. They had three children.
Hutchins died in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Hutchins died in Fairfield, Connecticut.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
January 28, 2018
Victorine L'Hommedieu has sexual fantasies about her older brother. She is 13 years old and her newly discovered sexual drive is all she can think about. Her home life is a mess. Her father has a penchant for mistresses and her mother is utterly clueless. When Victorine was first published in 1959 it was sold as erotic pulp fiction and given the title 'The Hands of Love'. This is another one of NYRB's attempts to rediscover a 'classic' but I'm afraid, with Victorine, there isn't much to rediscover.
The overall story of Victorine is fine. Where the novel strives is that it is an open and unapologetic document of a young girl's sexual awakening, describing her incestuous urges and lesbian encounters with total candidness (which is brave considering the era during which this novel was written). The secondary plots involving the rest of her family are somewhat expendable.
This novel falls down however due to no fault other than the pen of the author. Maude Hutchins just was not a very good writer of prose. Oftentimes her stray observations or images are far too on the nose and she seems to struggle to make one cohesive narrative. The novel is incredibly episodic, which I doubt was intentional, considering that it is a very slim volume. Each chapter almost reads like a short story and each can be summarised by simply stating 'And then Victorine did this'.
However I did enjoy this novel, despite its major flaws. It was good pulpy fun. It's the kind of book that I'd hand to someone and say 'read this and tell me what you think about it' and then we'd proceed to discussing it for several wine-fuelled hours. Victorine is a bit of a mess, but it's a fascinating mess.
The overall story of Victorine is fine. Where the novel strives is that it is an open and unapologetic document of a young girl's sexual awakening, describing her incestuous urges and lesbian encounters with total candidness (which is brave considering the era during which this novel was written). The secondary plots involving the rest of her family are somewhat expendable.
This novel falls down however due to no fault other than the pen of the author. Maude Hutchins just was not a very good writer of prose. Oftentimes her stray observations or images are far too on the nose and she seems to struggle to make one cohesive narrative. The novel is incredibly episodic, which I doubt was intentional, considering that it is a very slim volume. Each chapter almost reads like a short story and each can be summarised by simply stating 'And then Victorine did this'.
However I did enjoy this novel, despite its major flaws. It was good pulpy fun. It's the kind of book that I'd hand to someone and say 'read this and tell me what you think about it' and then we'd proceed to discussing it for several wine-fuelled hours. Victorine is a bit of a mess, but it's a fascinating mess.
December 3, 2023
Like an Anne of Green Gables but with added puberty.
We meet a fresh faced 13 year Victorine walking home from church with a cheery hello to all her neighbours for all the world like a perfect example of American childhood that has only existed in nostalgia, yet we know that while in church her thoughts have been those of the flesh – and not the eucharist kind. She returns home to a perfect family, Sunday lunch is prepared by their domestic, who is kind and part of the family and everyone loves. She has an older brother, a younger one who is doted on and wealthy attractive parent but beneath the surface is a bubbling cauldron of sex and desire.
Victorine spends a large part of the book exploring her sexuality and the power sex has over men. There are frequent references to an almost naïve and innocent relationship between her and her older brother which seems to border on the incestuous. He realises that as she hits puberty those games they played are no longer appropriate. She fantasises about the men in her sphere and has an ongoing friendship/relationship with the son of a woman who presents as the grand dame of the town but was merely her late husband’s domestic servant who was elevated through sex.
Carnality weighs heavy on the household, early on we sense all is not right when Victorine’s father behaves so oddly when a local seamstress comes to the house to deliver some clothing to the mother. This woman is the one Hector has had an affair with for the entirety of his marriage (it commenced on the eve of his wedding). One of the more awkward scenes is when Hector’s son, who is unaware of the affair, visits the woman with the intention of losing his virginity and in his failure to perform is told by the woman that he is not up to his father’s standards.
It’s a strange little vignette of an American family in suburbia with some added dreamlike inserts. An unusual, intriguing little affair.
We meet a fresh faced 13 year Victorine walking home from church with a cheery hello to all her neighbours for all the world like a perfect example of American childhood that has only existed in nostalgia, yet we know that while in church her thoughts have been those of the flesh – and not the eucharist kind. She returns home to a perfect family, Sunday lunch is prepared by their domestic, who is kind and part of the family and everyone loves. She has an older brother, a younger one who is doted on and wealthy attractive parent but beneath the surface is a bubbling cauldron of sex and desire.
Victorine spends a large part of the book exploring her sexuality and the power sex has over men. There are frequent references to an almost naïve and innocent relationship between her and her older brother which seems to border on the incestuous. He realises that as she hits puberty those games they played are no longer appropriate. She fantasises about the men in her sphere and has an ongoing friendship/relationship with the son of a woman who presents as the grand dame of the town but was merely her late husband’s domestic servant who was elevated through sex.
Carnality weighs heavy on the household, early on we sense all is not right when Victorine’s father behaves so oddly when a local seamstress comes to the house to deliver some clothing to the mother. This woman is the one Hector has had an affair with for the entirety of his marriage (it commenced on the eve of his wedding). One of the more awkward scenes is when Hector’s son, who is unaware of the affair, visits the woman with the intention of losing his virginity and in his failure to perform is told by the woman that he is not up to his father’s standards.
It’s a strange little vignette of an American family in suburbia with some added dreamlike inserts. An unusual, intriguing little affair.
February 4, 2020
Likely butt-bumped out of the pantheon of mid-20th century American classics for its unabashed, underlying vein of frank sexuality, this is a fine novel, calling to mind comparisons with John Williams and Joan Chase among Hutchins' fellow Americans, Elizabeth Taylor and Sylvia Townsend Warner on the Brit side of things.
Don't misconstrue the blurbs you'll see. Although this is a novel of sexual awakening with all its obligatory awkwardness and weirdness (who can forget that?) only a fool would be unsettled by something any human in full thrust undergoes. It is also a novel, though, about family disintegration, and not due to the loss of stupid moral values or what-have-you, because none of the adults in this novel really have any. It is about adult participation in the secret rites of what is supposed to be sin to the younger folks (extramarital affairs, mostly), and the slow decay in the rot of adulthood, while the supposed children, reap all the benefits of raw, pure sense and are thus the real heroes and heroines here.
Of course, novels like this get butt-bumped into obscurity because a) we're not supposed to bare ourselves completely and b) children, especially teenagers, are supposed to be robots.
Don't misconstrue the blurbs you'll see. Although this is a novel of sexual awakening with all its obligatory awkwardness and weirdness (who can forget that?) only a fool would be unsettled by something any human in full thrust undergoes. It is also a novel, though, about family disintegration, and not due to the loss of stupid moral values or what-have-you, because none of the adults in this novel really have any. It is about adult participation in the secret rites of what is supposed to be sin to the younger folks (extramarital affairs, mostly), and the slow decay in the rot of adulthood, while the supposed children, reap all the benefits of raw, pure sense and are thus the real heroes and heroines here.
Of course, novels like this get butt-bumped into obscurity because a) we're not supposed to bare ourselves completely and b) children, especially teenagers, are supposed to be robots.
February 21, 2019
Hutchins's Victorine deserves a place among the great adolescent voluptuaries of twentieth century literature: Dewey Dell Bundren and Janie Crawford spring to mind. The whole book has a teeming Southernliness to it, though it's supposed to be set in New England. It's sexually sweltering.
November 17, 2010
I was going to say that this novel is a pastiche of Nabokov, Cheever, and Lawrence, but that's not entirely accurate. It takes the worst impulses of those novelists and unsatirically invigorates them with a repugnant and wanton originality. It plumbs new depths of awfulness. One small example: 13-year-old nymphet Victorine wanders down by the railroad tracks, startling a hobo who is frying bacon over a campfire. They have a confused conversation about love and sex, Victorine not really understanding either. "You are guilty nevertheless," says the hobo. "I saw your guilt when you leaned over the fire with me, I saw it as plainly as if you had lifted your skirt and opened your legs, but I chose to ignore the invitation, I am not interested." Victorine steers the conversation back to love, but the hobo admonishes her. "You sit there without breasts and dare to speak of love!" Terry Castle's introduction casts Maude Hutchins as an unappreciated, rebellious free spirit, miserably married to precocious wonder boy and education pioneer Robert Maynard Hutchins, unable to fulfill the staid hostessing demands of university life. Bob Hutchins' "emotional focus was entirely on other men, from whom he elicited intense admiration," writes Castle. She quotes one of his protégés: "Bob has made homosexuals of us all." Intriguing.
November 15, 2008
Reading this book made me feel like I was trapped in a small holiday community in the 1950s with tranquilizers my only escape, which might be what Hutchins was suggesting by writing about a 13 year-old growing up in a wealthy New England family, but I doubt it. The repeated and offensively overt Freudian references only increased my nausea. There were far too many well-groomed stallions, forgotten dolls and overly coy references to sexuality to make this novel worthwhile; a pity, because occasionally she can write.
November 18, 2024
3.5 stars rounded down for Goodreads.
July 15, 2009
What an interesting read from cover to cover! A strange mix of campy, over-the-top Freudianism and profoundly creative and touching coming-of-age story - heavy on sexual themes. Strongly reminiscent of McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, and Lawrence - but filtered through a kind of outsider artist perspective. And Hutchins is no mere copycat - she has a unique and often powerful prose style. This novel is outrageous, kinky and moving - and absolutely never boring. [And Terry Castle's intro is pure genius.:]
July 9, 2023
3.5/5
This is a weird book, and not for the most part in a bad way. You see, if you've spent any time around the "American" mainstream view of sexuality, you know how inherently violent, obsessive, and pedophilic it is, the always stone cold pusher always thrusting their way into the always nubile receiver. As such, I may not be one to ever fuck with Freud, but the fact that Hutchins was able to do so in a way that makes Tampa look like an overdone and desiccated microwave dinner is always something worth pondering in literature, but especially so in these thoughtcrime 2.0 legislative days the US is currently going through. Since this is a woman author, folks are going to spend more time than not confusing their gutjerk reaction with critical evaluation, and while I'm not going to commit to that fourth star, that's due to how Hutchins let the build up fizzle out, not due to what descriptives she used where or how little she fucked around about the behavior of the average hormonal teen when under the exigencies of the social isolation of the (supposedly) cishet nuclear family and the darkly hinted at but ultimately poorly explained taboos of WASP culture. I'm not about to actively track down the rest of the author's work, but if there are others that are this brief and this rewardingly transgressive, I can't see myself passing by any conveniently priced copy that happens across my path.
What is a United States childhood? For one, you have to be white and Anglo, else you're not allowed one. Two, your body is a sin, your mind is disregarded, and what little worth there is in you depends as much on lack of will as it does on pure circumstance. So, the fact that Victorine frolics through her suburban yet bucolic community with this much demure abandon and erotic insouciance would be less surprising if you weren't familiar with the complete and utter lack of sex ed for juveniles in the early 20th century and how little a developing human body cares about how much its respective brain understands of its metamorphoses. Hutchins certainly doesn't describe the world of every puberty-stricken individual , but even her overbearing reliance on Freudianisms doesn't prevent her from showing a world that much more accurately predicts the rate of teenage pregnancies than any sort of sanitized neo-Victorian 'YA' is capable of achieving. The fact that it's going to make today's thoughtcrime obsessed adult reader violently uncomfortable demonstrates more the regression of the modern day literature scene than it does Hutchins' more awkward writing decisions. In any case, for all my sincere compliments, the second half really doesn't measure up to the promise of the first, although I will give the author kudos for the fearless ending. Lampooning the inviolate patriarch is one thing, but with not a small amount of blithe humor to top it off? Bravo.
Well, this book ended up being a great deal more interesting in ways that the NYRB Classics staff probably didn't intend. Sure, the imprint has put out a transgressive work here and there, but it could hardly expect to keep up its white boy wonderland, littered with endless editions of Simenon and the odd Chang or Kpomassie thrown in for 'diverse' shits and giggles, if it fully committed to the potential. Still, if they see fit to put out another Hutchins, I'll admit that I'd be more than a little intrigued. She's not the first white woman to rise and fall in the margins of the high artistic echelons, and she won't be the last, but here is a text where you can almost feel her tearing the misogynistic nails from her skin and unbolting the patriarchal clamp from her spine, and through the mouths of teenagers at that. Of course, the time when I could sympathize with such grows ever increasingly past, and should I indeed stumble across another of Hutchins' works, I'll be so far along my genderqueer journey of discovery that the morass of cis femininity may appear truly alien. Still, I have to give singular credit where singular credit is due, and this writer certainly didn't mind hitting the mark that many others wouldn't even begin to dare to touch.
This is a weird book, and not for the most part in a bad way. You see, if you've spent any time around the "American" mainstream view of sexuality, you know how inherently violent, obsessive, and pedophilic it is, the always stone cold pusher always thrusting their way into the always nubile receiver. As such, I may not be one to ever fuck with Freud, but the fact that Hutchins was able to do so in a way that makes Tampa look like an overdone and desiccated microwave dinner is always something worth pondering in literature, but especially so in these thoughtcrime 2.0 legislative days the US is currently going through. Since this is a woman author, folks are going to spend more time than not confusing their gutjerk reaction with critical evaluation, and while I'm not going to commit to that fourth star, that's due to how Hutchins let the build up fizzle out, not due to what descriptives she used where or how little she fucked around about the behavior of the average hormonal teen when under the exigencies of the social isolation of the (supposedly) cishet nuclear family and the darkly hinted at but ultimately poorly explained taboos of WASP culture. I'm not about to actively track down the rest of the author's work, but if there are others that are this brief and this rewardingly transgressive, I can't see myself passing by any conveniently priced copy that happens across my path.
What is a United States childhood? For one, you have to be white and Anglo, else you're not allowed one. Two, your body is a sin, your mind is disregarded, and what little worth there is in you depends as much on lack of will as it does on pure circumstance. So, the fact that Victorine frolics through her suburban yet bucolic community with this much demure abandon and erotic insouciance would be less surprising if you weren't familiar with the complete and utter lack of sex ed for juveniles in the early 20th century and how little a developing human body cares about how much its respective brain understands of its metamorphoses. Hutchins certainly doesn't describe the world of every puberty-stricken individual , but even her overbearing reliance on Freudianisms doesn't prevent her from showing a world that much more accurately predicts the rate of teenage pregnancies than any sort of sanitized neo-Victorian 'YA' is capable of achieving. The fact that it's going to make today's thoughtcrime obsessed adult reader violently uncomfortable demonstrates more the regression of the modern day literature scene than it does Hutchins' more awkward writing decisions. In any case, for all my sincere compliments, the second half really doesn't measure up to the promise of the first, although I will give the author kudos for the fearless ending. Lampooning the inviolate patriarch is one thing, but with not a small amount of blithe humor to top it off? Bravo.
Well, this book ended up being a great deal more interesting in ways that the NYRB Classics staff probably didn't intend. Sure, the imprint has put out a transgressive work here and there, but it could hardly expect to keep up its white boy wonderland, littered with endless editions of Simenon and the odd Chang or Kpomassie thrown in for 'diverse' shits and giggles, if it fully committed to the potential. Still, if they see fit to put out another Hutchins, I'll admit that I'd be more than a little intrigued. She's not the first white woman to rise and fall in the margins of the high artistic echelons, and she won't be the last, but here is a text where you can almost feel her tearing the misogynistic nails from her skin and unbolting the patriarchal clamp from her spine, and through the mouths of teenagers at that. Of course, the time when I could sympathize with such grows ever increasingly past, and should I indeed stumble across another of Hutchins' works, I'll be so far along my genderqueer journey of discovery that the morass of cis femininity may appear truly alien. Still, I have to give singular credit where singular credit is due, and this writer certainly didn't mind hitting the mark that many others wouldn't even begin to dare to touch.
August 15, 2012
One of the New York Review of Books "rediscovered" titles, Victorine features a fresh and exhilarating narrative voice. I had never heard of Maude Hutchins, who may have painted a self-portrait both in the 12-year-old Victorine character and another older adult who figures in the latter part of the story. Looking at commentary afterwards to learn a little more about the late Mrs. Hutchins, whose educator husband Robert was the greater celebrity, I found many comparisons to other authors, but I found this book unique. Published originally in 1959, the book's erotic frankness should have made it some kind of a hit in the era of Salinger and Lolita, but it evidently did not. Erotic frankness -- probably sounds like a lot of sex scenes. Some, but more than that, it is the way in which Victorine looks at life. The shrubbery can be erotic, in her eyes, because at one moment it reflects life and our desire for life in an intense way. Not a perfect novel, or it would have deserved five stars, but I can only repeat that word exhilarating to describe it -- I read this with great, revivifying enjoyment. Different and fun.
Read
January 22, 2018Uhhhh…Shit. When did I read this one? I think it was…winter? Or maybe I was traveling somewhere? No, it couldn’t had been winter I don’t think. Could it? This is not useful. It’s an episodic series of recollections from a mid century farm house, with the girl sublimating a lot of sexual energy into a relationship with a retard who thinks he's a horse, and a cheating father, and I think the brother masturbates. The vagueness of my recollection is a pretty strong argument for trying to write these reviews down in a timely fashion, but probably also speak to the fact that this one didn't hit me real hard. Drop.
May 27, 2015
An interesting find at the Chicago Public Library, Harold Washington Regional branch.
The book is written by a woman that was compared to Zelda Fitzgerald. Intelligent and yet unstable.
Victorine reads at equal parts like a girl's diary, very self-aware and full of itself. And yet the substance shows it is so much more. The book really speaks and delves into the disaster that is the life of a girl realizing her sexuality and sensuality (outside of her body).
The book is written by a woman that was compared to Zelda Fitzgerald. Intelligent and yet unstable.
Victorine reads at equal parts like a girl's diary, very self-aware and full of itself. And yet the substance shows it is so much more. The book really speaks and delves into the disaster that is the life of a girl realizing her sexuality and sensuality (outside of her body).
December 13, 2012
lush and elegant. i adored this sly little book. although published in the late 50's, there's nothing chaste about it. in the first chapter, 13 year old victorine comes for the first time as her mother calls her "to come" for supper. you'll love getting lost in maude hutchin's hothouse.
June 13, 2013
I completely understand why this book wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea. Its faults are easy to spot: it's overwritten (the words hypnogogic and pneumatic should have been banished from her vocabulary), overheated, full of weird Freudian symbolism (like dolls with fur tippets to play with in her lap, play that makes her feel so much shame that she subsequently hides all her dolls in the attic where she won't be tempted to play with them again). But Hutchens gets the overly intense, self-dramatizing strangeness of adolescence right, its polymorphous perversity and the uncomfortable complexities of the family romance of which they are a part. And the book is full of weird little details and moments that feel exactly right (like the "glamorous tomboy" who tries to get a boy's attention by sitting on top of a piano and playing it with her toes). So, not a book for everyone, but if it's right for you, you'll really like it.
July 27, 2014
Meh. Part of this just was wrong timing (right now, I want a narrative that propels itself forward, rather than one that lingers and drifts off) but I don't think I would ever have been in love with this. It reminded me a lot of Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop but without the hunger that is so essential to that novel and to Carter herself, really. Victorine is so innocent in a strange way; I prefer my heroines just a bit more devious, just a bit more self-conscious. (I could read an entire novel about Magda Smith, now.)
January 12, 2013
A powerful, beautifully written tale of a sister and brother (12 and 16 years old, respectively) and their separate yet familially intertwined erotic awakenings. The prose of the book works on the reader the way that adolescent desire works on the characters, enforcing an atmosphere of omnipresent, daunting, sense-filling, sense-cloying, at times uncanny sexual and emotional possibility. I had never heard of this author before but was completely won over by her prose style. Her sentences loop and soar like birds. So glad this book found me.
May 27, 2016
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but it was the chapters "Magda Smith", and "The little Missive" which really stood out for me, highlighting the beauty and poetry in Hutchins' writing. It was a strange little novel, which lots of little threads that led nowhere . . . but I like that.
November 7, 2022
total batshit I couldn’t stop laughing
January 12, 2022
bonkers, i loved every minute
December 7, 2022
i hope Fool Fred is okay
Read
September 30, 2011Our Victorine is a strange one. She’s a bright-eyed adolescent, rapt and giddy with the secrets her body has just begun to disclose. And everything is hyper-eroticized, every brush with the world summons an arousal—it’s nearly ridiculous. Everything is sex! And not even necessarily a prelude to intercourse, mind you, but to a new and different heady sensation awakening within her body.
"As she had lain for those few moments on her back, half naked, caressing herself, waiting for male co-operation, she had been, perhaps, neither good nor evil, just an anthropological specimen."
The Alice in Wonderland-like distortion to the burgeoning sexuality of Victorine works in its favor, convinces the reader of its credibility. Even when our proto-nymphet glances against possible threats—a bum! a creepily obsessive older brother who is nonetheless painted as those sensitive, be-lacy-hankerchief-ed souls—she comes out unscathed, because her wonder protects her from fear. Her preoccupation with how her body reacts makes everything fun, even harmless.
"As she had lain for those few moments on her back, half naked, caressing herself, waiting for male co-operation, she had been, perhaps, neither good nor evil, just an anthropological specimen."
The Alice in Wonderland-like distortion to the burgeoning sexuality of Victorine works in its favor, convinces the reader of its credibility. Even when our proto-nymphet glances against possible threats—a bum! a creepily obsessive older brother who is nonetheless painted as those sensitive, be-lacy-hankerchief-ed souls—she comes out unscathed, because her wonder protects her from fear. Her preoccupation with how her body reacts makes everything fun, even harmless.
February 4, 2013
What a weird book! The omniscient third person voice allows access to the consciousnesses of a twelve/thirteen year old girl, Victorine, all the members of her family, and her friends and acquaintances. And what is uppermost in these consciousnesses...sex of course. But Victorine doesn't quite know what sex is, and her brother Costello *really* doesn't have a clue and has even less after his father exhorts in his only Father-Son talk - "Don't leave anything in writing."
What is fascinating about this book was how un-squishy it was - none of that Lawrencian babble that goes on for pages. Also it wasn't all Young-Adulty (thank God!). Hutchins takes the awakenings of Victorine as it comes and doesn't sentimentalize, sugarcoat, or infantilize it. The wry and sardonic prose also propelled me from paragraph to paragraph. Lots of symbolism is scattered throughout in a quasi-Nabokovian manner, but it is subtle and if you catch it, it works great, and if you don't, you aren't too worried about it.
What is fascinating about this book was how un-squishy it was - none of that Lawrencian babble that goes on for pages. Also it wasn't all Young-Adulty (thank God!). Hutchins takes the awakenings of Victorine as it comes and doesn't sentimentalize, sugarcoat, or infantilize it. The wry and sardonic prose also propelled me from paragraph to paragraph. Lots of symbolism is scattered throughout in a quasi-Nabokovian manner, but it is subtle and if you catch it, it works great, and if you don't, you aren't too worried about it.
May 29, 2016
I was expecting so much more. After reading an exceptional amount of fantastic reviews, I dove head first into this little book. I was expecting a Lolita type story; a young girls discovering of her own body and sexuality, minus the creepy pedophile. What I read instead was a bland, boring account of historical adolescent life.
Victorine was lifeless, skipping through life with her brother Costello, who was equally vapid. With absolutely no storyline, I only finished the book by flipping ahead and speed reading. For a book supposedly about sexual awakening, I was falling asleep. Deeply disappointed.
Victorine was lifeless, skipping through life with her brother Costello, who was equally vapid. With absolutely no storyline, I only finished the book by flipping ahead and speed reading. For a book supposedly about sexual awakening, I was falling asleep. Deeply disappointed.
February 5, 2010
A short novel on the dawning (if dawning can last two years) of sexual awareness in Victorine and Costello, adolescent brother and sister--teen years in which almost everything possesses an erotic charge. Reviewers complained when the book was first published some decades ago that Hutchins's eroticism was obsessive. . . In the case of this novel, her "obsessiveness" works just fine.
December 20, 2013
I liked how it captured sexual desire before it's categorized in a young person's mind, when it's just "it" and can be set off by anything. Also this horse kept showing up with a tail like a colourless rainbow, and genitals big and firm like peaches. So, yes, I liked it.
September 23, 2008
Hutchins' prose starts clumsily - maybe at first too many commas - thinking, stopping, sensing - but eventually finishes absolutely beautifully. Adolescence.
January 13, 2015
Totally bizarre and not really good, but so overheated that there is definite entertainment value here.
Want to read
August 24, 2012I BLAME JACOB -- There I was, in Half Price, looking for Antonia White and Angela Carter, and then I see one of those signatory NYRB spines.
April 18, 2016
It is hard to rate this book, well written yet quite bizarre.
August 30, 2021
The voice of Victorine captures the intensity of adolescence (naïve but knowing, immature but sometimes treated like an adult, confident but terrified).
Sexual awakening is a major focus - particularly on the taboo nature of sexual feelings and how very real an imaginary sexual experience can feel.
In the second half, Homer's death takes over and we lose sight of Victorine. Her and Costello feel little or nothing about the death, which ought to be telling, but isn't explored.
Sexual awakening is a major focus - particularly on the taboo nature of sexual feelings and how very real an imaginary sexual experience can feel.
In the second half, Homer's death takes over and we lose sight of Victorine. Her and Costello feel little or nothing about the death, which ought to be telling, but isn't explored.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews