Christine Schutt is the author of the short-story collections A DAY, A NIGHT, ANOTHER DAY, SUMMER and NIGHTWORK (named by the poet John Ashbery as the 1996 Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year) as well as the critically acclaimed novel FLORIDA, which was a 2004 National Book Award Finalist.

In her new novel ALL SOULS, published by Harcourt (April 2008), popular high school student Astra Dell fights a rare cancer in the hospital, whilst her classmates at an exclusive Manhattan private school concern themselves with boys, teachers, exams, dance recitals, college applications, graduation, and, of course, the ailing Astra. 

Christine Schutt lives and teaches in New York City. We caught up over email.

What was the inspiration for ALL SOULS?

First came the name Astra Dell on an afternoon when I had been thinking of Pip’s Estella, and her name’s associations, the stars, the sky, the sky as it is experienced when Pip and Estella walk in Miss Havisham’s ruined garden.  Romantic, gauzy associations were in the air when I came up with the name Astra Dell, which combined sky and dell and seemed silly but worthy of any and all exaggerated beauty and gracefulness I might wish to attach to it.  The name, the dancer, the hair in that order; I committed to her saintliness when I took up her sickness and a community’s reaction to it as the way to organize and write a school novel with a large cast.  The saintliness and the sickness I took from life, a former student’s; she is thanked in the acknowledgments. 

The novel is set in New York in 1997.  Was it a conscious decision to set it before 9/11 or were there other reasons for the date?

Yes, I wanted the New York City I knew before September 11, 2001; the earlier date allows for a jolly solipsism, self-involvement mitigated by age and inexperience of emptiness.  In the novel, when Astra Dell is rumored sickest, she is a topic avoided for the simple reason that the sick girl’s “futureless future” horrifies her friends.  (Healthy girls, marginally unhealthy girls, American girls of all classes, do not, in my experience, look into a summer and see blank; rather, there is camp or a trip or an internship.) Since September 11, 2001, the possibility of the futureless future for us all in an instant occurs to anyone even passing through the city; everyone has been made a bit older and harder by the event—even the girls I know and teach seem born cynical.  As to why 97, my choice was made by my sons, teenagers at the time, full-blown, wonderful and awful; they and their friends and their girlfriends and the girls I taught made a deep impression on me in 1997.

All Souls raises some very uncomfortable issues (notably sexual relationships between adults and teens in their care).  Do you think it is important for fiction to be challenging?

Writers look for dramatic interest, and my experience of outdoor dramas—one drowning, two suicides, some accidents involving animals or heavy machinery—is yet small in comparison to the indoor dramas I might elaborate on.  The greatest of these dramas involve plausible sexual transgressions that keep me awake when I am writing. The writer, as much as the reader then, is challenged to look. 

I found it interesting that you’re quite un-judgmental of your characters’ behavior.  Is moral ambiguity important to your fiction?

I don’t set out to be morally ambiguous.  I want to be fair in the treatment of my characters, to admit any action is possible. 

Read part two of my Q & A with Christine Schutt tomorrow!