News and Reviews
Praise for Spheres of Disturbance
“This book feels like going somewhere, not like reading. Pack your suitcase for traveling. Amy Schutzer has done it again: written a novel so lush with sensual, sensory detail that you enter her world and become characters’ kin. It’s an old-fashioned experience; I mean focus. Spheres of Disturbance is a book the way books were when people got lost in them, lost hours and days in pages. It’s beautiful and musical and wise and curious, like your first trip to a library: go.” —Carol Guess, author of Doll Studies: Forensics
“Amy Schutzer’s characters are ordinary people trying to find their way to each other through the complexities of love, birth, and death. She peels away the layers of fear and despair and loneliness to reveal the dark, and sometimes zany, messiness of the human condition, each tangled life colored vividly by history, longing, and failure. Her descents into the long memories of this small group on this single day are dizzyingly steep and wise. —Joanna Rose, author of Little Miss Strange
See more at: Red Hen Press
Read the interview in Shelf Unbound
“This book feels like going somewhere, not like reading. Pack your suitcase for traveling. Amy Schutzer has done it again: written a novel so lush with sensual, sensory detail that you enter her world and become characters’ kin. It’s an old-fashioned experience; I mean focus. Spheres of Disturbance is a book the way books were when people got lost in them, lost hours and days in pages. It’s beautiful and musical and wise and curious, like your first trip to a library: go.” —Carol Guess, author of Doll Studies: Forensics
“Amy Schutzer’s characters are ordinary people trying to find their way to each other through the complexities of love, birth, and death. She peels away the layers of fear and despair and loneliness to reveal the dark, and sometimes zany, messiness of the human condition, each tangled life colored vividly by history, longing, and failure. Her descents into the long memories of this small group on this single day are dizzyingly steep and wise. —Joanna Rose, author of Little Miss Strange
See more at: Red Hen Press
Read the interview in Shelf Unbound
For an interactive ePressKit with oodles of info, including excerpts from my novels and poetry, with soon-to-be audio and video readings from Spheres of Disturbance click StoriAd. You can also request a Review Copy from them!
MORE REVIEWS FOR SPHERES OF DISTURBANCE
From BOOKTRIB :
Top 5 spring reading picks from off the beaten path - by Melissa Duclos
Spring is the perfect time to get to know some new authors. If you’ve been keeping up with your BookTrib reading, you know that 2014 has been dubbed “The Year of Reading Women.” My run-down last month of five female authors everyone should read hopefully got you off to a good start, but what’s next? This month, we’ll go off the beaten path, highlighting a handful of new novels from small presses. Small or “indie” presses—meaning those that are independently owned and operated outside of the control of a large conglomerate like Penguin/Random House or Simon & Schuster—are the place to go to find new, creative, and often experimental work. These presses operate on smaller budgets, and with lower expectations for profits; since they don’t have shareholders to keep happy, they can afford to take risks. In the world of big publishing, unknown authors, experimental books, and new takes on genre are all considered risky. All this means that small presses are your best bet if you’re looking for a book that surprises you, or that pushes the boundaries of traditional narrative in any way.
Spheres of Disturbance by Amy Schutzer (Red Hen Press, April 1) The nine revolving points of view in this novel, which takes place over the course of one day in 1985, give the reader something of the experimental that we come to expect from small presses. The book details the impending death of Helen, and the characters surrounding her, including her daughter, an art thief, a housewife, a lesbian poet, and a pregnant Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, to come to terms with her death. Spheres of Disturbance is Schutzer’s second novel. - See more at: BOOKTRIB
Top 5 spring reading picks from off the beaten path - by Melissa Duclos
Spring is the perfect time to get to know some new authors. If you’ve been keeping up with your BookTrib reading, you know that 2014 has been dubbed “The Year of Reading Women.” My run-down last month of five female authors everyone should read hopefully got you off to a good start, but what’s next? This month, we’ll go off the beaten path, highlighting a handful of new novels from small presses. Small or “indie” presses—meaning those that are independently owned and operated outside of the control of a large conglomerate like Penguin/Random House or Simon & Schuster—are the place to go to find new, creative, and often experimental work. These presses operate on smaller budgets, and with lower expectations for profits; since they don’t have shareholders to keep happy, they can afford to take risks. In the world of big publishing, unknown authors, experimental books, and new takes on genre are all considered risky. All this means that small presses are your best bet if you’re looking for a book that surprises you, or that pushes the boundaries of traditional narrative in any way.
Spheres of Disturbance by Amy Schutzer (Red Hen Press, April 1) The nine revolving points of view in this novel, which takes place over the course of one day in 1985, give the reader something of the experimental that we come to expect from small presses. The book details the impending death of Helen, and the characters surrounding her, including her daughter, an art thief, a housewife, a lesbian poet, and a pregnant Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, to come to terms with her death. Spheres of Disturbance is Schutzer’s second novel. - See more at: BOOKTRIB
ForeWord Review — Summer 2014
With compassion, Schutzer shares a quirky story, balanced in its humor and solemnity.
A pregnant potbellied pig and a dying woman are at the heart of this novel about birth, death, and the power of love. Amy Schutzer’s whimsical Spheres of Disturbance is narrated by nine different characters, including a pig named Charlotta, during a single day, as a small town comes to terms with one woman’s decision to die, even as she acknowledges all that she loves and will miss.
It’s the morning of October 19, 1985, and Avery is getting ready for a big garage sale. She hopes her Vietnamese potbellied pig can wait to go into labor until the yard sale is over. Across town, Sammy, Avery’s lover, is desperately pretending that her mother, Helen, isn’t dying. For the past year, Sammy has rejected anyone who tried to get her to talk about what is happening. But Helen has had enough, and her friend Joe has agreed to help.
To complicate matters, Helen’s estranged family is headed her way with an aggressive, fast-talking lawyer. In Joe’s family, his wife has befriended his sharp-tongued sister, and his daughter is beginning to question her sexuality. It’s unclear whether Joe is just a kind man or, by helping Helen, he is trying to rectify his relationship with his dead father.
Initially, the multiple voices and story lines, while consistently entertaining, hold readers at arm’s length. When the focus settles on Helen, the book drops below the surface and takes off.
Schutzer writes with compassion and a quirky sense of humor. Readers will feel like they’ve taken an autumn drive into the country and ended up at a garage sale where an Elvis cutout greets them at the door and an altar for confused moments offers comfort in the backyard.
It’s Charlotta, the expectant mother pig, who serves as the story’s final catalyst. “Charlotta walks up to Sammy’s legs and leans her head against them … conveying love.” Later, Helen, barely hanging on to life, sees Charlotta in her pen with her piglets and is flooded with the bounty of life and aware of its fragility. The spheres of the title—family, lovers, and community—are interwoven with fear and desire. It all comes together at Avery’s garage sale.
Karen Ackland
May 27, 2014
With compassion, Schutzer shares a quirky story, balanced in its humor and solemnity.
A pregnant potbellied pig and a dying woman are at the heart of this novel about birth, death, and the power of love. Amy Schutzer’s whimsical Spheres of Disturbance is narrated by nine different characters, including a pig named Charlotta, during a single day, as a small town comes to terms with one woman’s decision to die, even as she acknowledges all that she loves and will miss.
It’s the morning of October 19, 1985, and Avery is getting ready for a big garage sale. She hopes her Vietnamese potbellied pig can wait to go into labor until the yard sale is over. Across town, Sammy, Avery’s lover, is desperately pretending that her mother, Helen, isn’t dying. For the past year, Sammy has rejected anyone who tried to get her to talk about what is happening. But Helen has had enough, and her friend Joe has agreed to help.
To complicate matters, Helen’s estranged family is headed her way with an aggressive, fast-talking lawyer. In Joe’s family, his wife has befriended his sharp-tongued sister, and his daughter is beginning to question her sexuality. It’s unclear whether Joe is just a kind man or, by helping Helen, he is trying to rectify his relationship with his dead father.
Initially, the multiple voices and story lines, while consistently entertaining, hold readers at arm’s length. When the focus settles on Helen, the book drops below the surface and takes off.
Schutzer writes with compassion and a quirky sense of humor. Readers will feel like they’ve taken an autumn drive into the country and ended up at a garage sale where an Elvis cutout greets them at the door and an altar for confused moments offers comfort in the backyard.
It’s Charlotta, the expectant mother pig, who serves as the story’s final catalyst. “Charlotta walks up to Sammy’s legs and leans her head against them … conveying love.” Later, Helen, barely hanging on to life, sees Charlotta in her pen with her piglets and is flooded with the bounty of life and aware of its fragility. The spheres of the title—family, lovers, and community—are interwoven with fear and desire. It all comes together at Avery’s garage sale.
Karen Ackland
May 27, 2014
Library Journal
06/01/2014
Both luminous and packed, Lambda Literary Award finalist Schutzer's narrative presents Helen, calmly facing death, as friends and family in their small town try to cope. Among them are Helen's tall, venturesome daughter, Sammy, and lesbian poet Avery, who's compensating for a lost grant by raising Charlotta, a pregnant Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, undeniably the book's best character. VERDICT For readers who like drama tightly focused on the everyday but with edge.
06/01/2014
Both luminous and packed, Lambda Literary Award finalist Schutzer's narrative presents Helen, calmly facing death, as friends and family in their small town try to cope. Among them are Helen's tall, venturesome daughter, Sammy, and lesbian poet Avery, who's compensating for a lost grant by raising Charlotta, a pregnant Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, undeniably the book's best character. VERDICT For readers who like drama tightly focused on the everyday but with edge.
Cleavers Magazine (for full review click on Cleavers Magazine)
Issue No. 6
reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier
When my mother-in-law was dying of ovarian cancer, I had no patience for fiction. That summer, I sat by her bedside, reading while she slept--Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying, sent to me by a friend who worked for the National Hospice Foundation. Though I’d always sought out stories to figure out how to live, in the face of her death, I urgently needed reality-based guidance.
This spring, I carried Amy Schutzer’s Spheres of Disturbance with me as I spent long days in the hospital, and later hospice, with my father. That a literary novel could help me sort through the painful experience of losing him says much about Schutzer’s skill—and more about her wisdom. Compassion informs every line of her story about Helen, whose breast cancer returns metastasized, and about the circle of people who are moved by her impending death.
Schutzer circumvents the expected (and dreaded) arc of a terminal illness story by shifting among nine different points of view. She advances in time through a single day and in depth through a web of interdependent characters: a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig named Charlotta; Charlotta’s handler, the poet Avery; Avery’s lover Sammy; Sammy’s mother Helen; Helen’s sister Rosie and co-conspirator Joe; and Joe’s sister Frances, wife Marjorie, and daughter Darla. These characters converge at Avery’s garage sale, where she offloads her friends’ long-stored (and finally unclaimed) baggage to clear space for Charlotta’s imminent litter. Like the kitchen table where Helen feels strongest—“most sure that the cancer would be sent packing back into remission, for how could she not be part of this life?”—the sale is a spiritual meeting place, gathering the friends who are her surrogate family and the few members of her original family who seek an 11th-hour reunion.
If a pregnant pig’s point of view seems implausible, it’s Schutzer’s way of grounding a transcendent story about death in the messy, fleshy, sensory details of life. Her complicated, well-drawn characters find meaning in the mundane . . .
Schutzer writes beautifully. “Helen blinks and her lids are dark, her face puffy, but her skin is fragile, papery,” Sammy observes near the book’s (and her mother’s) end. “It is her mom, but her mom changing into something like a waterfall; unholdable.”
By anchoring her story even as she transcends it, Schutzer underscores that death is a natural, present, and present-tense process, rather than a fear-clouded experience that takes place in some parallel universe. Spheres of Disturbance resonates with honesty and humanity—perhaps why I found it so helpful and comforting.
Elizabeth Mosier is the author of The Playgroup, part of the Gemma Open Door series to promote adult literacy, My Life as a Girl (Random House), and numerous short stories and essays. She has recently completed a new novel, Ghost Signs. Her website is www.ElizabethMosier.com.
Issue No. 6
reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier
When my mother-in-law was dying of ovarian cancer, I had no patience for fiction. That summer, I sat by her bedside, reading while she slept--Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying, sent to me by a friend who worked for the National Hospice Foundation. Though I’d always sought out stories to figure out how to live, in the face of her death, I urgently needed reality-based guidance.
This spring, I carried Amy Schutzer’s Spheres of Disturbance with me as I spent long days in the hospital, and later hospice, with my father. That a literary novel could help me sort through the painful experience of losing him says much about Schutzer’s skill—and more about her wisdom. Compassion informs every line of her story about Helen, whose breast cancer returns metastasized, and about the circle of people who are moved by her impending death.
Schutzer circumvents the expected (and dreaded) arc of a terminal illness story by shifting among nine different points of view. She advances in time through a single day and in depth through a web of interdependent characters: a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig named Charlotta; Charlotta’s handler, the poet Avery; Avery’s lover Sammy; Sammy’s mother Helen; Helen’s sister Rosie and co-conspirator Joe; and Joe’s sister Frances, wife Marjorie, and daughter Darla. These characters converge at Avery’s garage sale, where she offloads her friends’ long-stored (and finally unclaimed) baggage to clear space for Charlotta’s imminent litter. Like the kitchen table where Helen feels strongest—“most sure that the cancer would be sent packing back into remission, for how could she not be part of this life?”—the sale is a spiritual meeting place, gathering the friends who are her surrogate family and the few members of her original family who seek an 11th-hour reunion.
If a pregnant pig’s point of view seems implausible, it’s Schutzer’s way of grounding a transcendent story about death in the messy, fleshy, sensory details of life. Her complicated, well-drawn characters find meaning in the mundane . . .
Schutzer writes beautifully. “Helen blinks and her lids are dark, her face puffy, but her skin is fragile, papery,” Sammy observes near the book’s (and her mother’s) end. “It is her mom, but her mom changing into something like a waterfall; unholdable.”
By anchoring her story even as she transcends it, Schutzer underscores that death is a natural, present, and present-tense process, rather than a fear-clouded experience that takes place in some parallel universe. Spheres of Disturbance resonates with honesty and humanity—perhaps why I found it so helpful and comforting.
Elizabeth Mosier is the author of The Playgroup, part of the Gemma Open Door series to promote adult literacy, My Life as a Girl (Random House), and numerous short stories and essays. She has recently completed a new novel, Ghost Signs. Her website is www.ElizabethMosier.com.
The Collagist (for full review click on The Collagist)
Online literature from Dzanc Books
Issue Fifty-Nine
June 2014
Excerpts of review by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy
Amy Schutzer's second novel, Spheres of Disturbance, brims with ambitious characters and the things they love to create: hand-carved bowls and macramé plant holders, gallery installations, and books of poetry. It is 1985 in an upstate New York town full of artists and would-be artists, a place where a garage sale includes a live musical performance, a place of such frenetic invention that casual conversation soon turns to lengthy expounding on the definition of art. Amidst the clutter of these amusingly self-important discussions are items of much deeper consequence: Sammy, a young woman, is watching her mother, Helen, die.
Sammy, one of Schutzer's stronger characters, is also one of the least consumed by her own creative pursuits. She is devoted to her mother, who has reconciled herself to numerous misfortunes: to the family that abandoned her, over thirty years ago, during her out-of-wedlock pregnancy; and to the fact that her death is approaching, and she wants to choose how her life ends. Helen seeks comfort in both Sammy and Sammy's girlfriend, Avery, an earnest poet who fears that her "thoughts are mired in clichés." Sammy and Avery provide Helen with whatever they can: lunches of "fresh haddock, brown rice, buckwheat, tofu," board games, and poetry readings. Avery faces the nearness of Helen's death in a way that Sammy cannot, and this is a frequent source of tension between them. Schutzer writes that Sammy "will not admit to the trajectory" of cancer, but Sammy is engrossed in her mother's palliative care—an admission, certainly, even if an unspoken one.
Avery is Helen's primary confidante, though Helen is also close to Sammy's employer, Joe, who she enlists to help her with a plan for the end of her life. She wants "to go in the river and float on down, eventually over Niagara Falls." Her timing coincides with the appearance of her estranged sisters, Rosie and Maureen; with Avery's massive garage sale; and with the birth of a litter of piglets at Avery's house. Schutzer delivers each of these scenes, and the general sense of growing chaos, with piercing descriptive skill. As the music stops at the garage sale, where everyone has converged, "[t]he rafters seem full of chords and harmonies, the notes settle onto the high wood." This lovely image prepares us for cacophonous resolution.
Sammy and Avery are inextricably bound to Helen, whose illness infects their relationship by making Sammy withdraw. "Over the last year Sammy has tried to revert to a stranger [. . . .] The doubts Avery has come down to one: will Sammy allow love?" Avery's ultimate declaration is one of passivity: "the only way I can go forward is to be who I am, and let you be who you are."
The core of this novel is Sammy and Helen's family, along with a few of the people they allow into their lives . . . but the most compelling moments are quiet ones, unattached to conceits. Rosie leaves Will in a donut shop; Helen wishes for "[o]ne more time through the snow" as she walks outside; and Sammy tells her dying mother "it's okay, Mom, it's okay," when she isn't at all sure if it's true.
Online literature from Dzanc Books
Issue Fifty-Nine
June 2014
Excerpts of review by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy
Amy Schutzer's second novel, Spheres of Disturbance, brims with ambitious characters and the things they love to create: hand-carved bowls and macramé plant holders, gallery installations, and books of poetry. It is 1985 in an upstate New York town full of artists and would-be artists, a place where a garage sale includes a live musical performance, a place of such frenetic invention that casual conversation soon turns to lengthy expounding on the definition of art. Amidst the clutter of these amusingly self-important discussions are items of much deeper consequence: Sammy, a young woman, is watching her mother, Helen, die.
Sammy, one of Schutzer's stronger characters, is also one of the least consumed by her own creative pursuits. She is devoted to her mother, who has reconciled herself to numerous misfortunes: to the family that abandoned her, over thirty years ago, during her out-of-wedlock pregnancy; and to the fact that her death is approaching, and she wants to choose how her life ends. Helen seeks comfort in both Sammy and Sammy's girlfriend, Avery, an earnest poet who fears that her "thoughts are mired in clichés." Sammy and Avery provide Helen with whatever they can: lunches of "fresh haddock, brown rice, buckwheat, tofu," board games, and poetry readings. Avery faces the nearness of Helen's death in a way that Sammy cannot, and this is a frequent source of tension between them. Schutzer writes that Sammy "will not admit to the trajectory" of cancer, but Sammy is engrossed in her mother's palliative care—an admission, certainly, even if an unspoken one.
Avery is Helen's primary confidante, though Helen is also close to Sammy's employer, Joe, who she enlists to help her with a plan for the end of her life. She wants "to go in the river and float on down, eventually over Niagara Falls." Her timing coincides with the appearance of her estranged sisters, Rosie and Maureen; with Avery's massive garage sale; and with the birth of a litter of piglets at Avery's house. Schutzer delivers each of these scenes, and the general sense of growing chaos, with piercing descriptive skill. As the music stops at the garage sale, where everyone has converged, "[t]he rafters seem full of chords and harmonies, the notes settle onto the high wood." This lovely image prepares us for cacophonous resolution.
Sammy and Avery are inextricably bound to Helen, whose illness infects their relationship by making Sammy withdraw. "Over the last year Sammy has tried to revert to a stranger [. . . .] The doubts Avery has come down to one: will Sammy allow love?" Avery's ultimate declaration is one of passivity: "the only way I can go forward is to be who I am, and let you be who you are."
The core of this novel is Sammy and Helen's family, along with a few of the people they allow into their lives . . . but the most compelling moments are quiet ones, unattached to conceits. Rosie leaves Will in a donut shop; Helen wishes for "[o]ne more time through the snow" as she walks outside; and Sammy tells her dying mother "it's okay, Mom, it's okay," when she isn't at all sure if it's true.
Monkeybicycle
Reviewed by Michelle Newby
“Death is the final stroke of randomness, and we must wait for it, isn’t that what we’re told?” writes Amy Schutzer in Spheres of Disturbance, a sweetly affecting story of the last day of Helen’s life. The novel shifts between nine points of view, among them Helen’s daughter Sammy, an almost long-lost sister Rosie, Avery the poet, and a pregnant Vietnamese pot-bellied pig christened Charlotta. Most of the story unfolds at Avery’s garage sale, where seemingly the entire town makes an appearance and an all-woman band from the local lesbian farm collective provides the entertainment, usually musical.
Make no mistake--Spheres is by no means all sweetness and light. Helen is losing a battle with breast cancer that has metastasized to her bones and lungs. She has chosen this day to die. Our culture doesn’t know what to do with sickness, much less death. It’s as if ill health were a personal failing, a question of morality, of will. The “right to die” is a controversial and difficult topic; questions of personal autonomy always are. Helen’s daughter Sammy has spent the last couple of years in serious denial and at the beginning of this book believes that Helen should live for her, if for no other reason. No one is allowed to breathe the word “death” in Sammy’s presence, and this is damaging all her relationships. We follow along as Sammy makes the journey to a certain acceptance, if not peace.
You won’t read Spheres for plot and action. You will read Spheres for the diversity of characters and their completeness, for the complexity of relationships and community ties, for the sheer joy of skillful, precise, somehow intuitive language. Words are important in this book, both to the characters and to the author. Words are carefully chosen. For example, this passage comes from a scene between Sammy and Avery in which Sammy is flirting with taking down the wall that protects her from her mother’s imminent death:
She stands close. Not touching, just before touching. Knees close and thighs close and the buttons of their coats close. Sammy removes her hands from her pockets, from the box of cough drops and a flat green stone. The wind is in her palms and it is cold. Avery wishes those hands would rise up like leaves and land softly on her skin. But there is no hurrying Sammy. She unfolds her hands like flowers, each finger from the palm.
I was delighted by Schutzer’s powers of description, often pastoral but unexpectedly sharp. “Daylight seeps through the weeping willows with their breathy leaf curtains and strikes.” Charlotta the pig snorting along in the wake of Avery and Joe, discovering where they’ve been:
Dirt with oak leaves and linden, Cheerios, coffee grounds, flakes of alfalfa, and sweet, sweet apples. Joe. Where does he go? She doesn’t know. But where he goes has tickling grass, pine needles, dried-up dog doo, and something sweet…sweet but not apples.
Schutzer conveys a myriad of meanings in a single passage. “The man next to Rosie extends his hand. On his wrist hangs an oversized gold watch that includes several smaller dials within the larger blue face. It’s a watch that says the man wearing it will compare it to Joe’s, a Mickey Mouse Timex Darla gave him for his birthday, and draw conclusions.” There are also flashes of humor like this one: “…her mom is dying, though the word itself is so taboo that the doctors, the hospital, the American Cancer Society call it a battle instead. A war. There are cheerleaders…You can beat this, yes you can! Two, four, six, eight: only three more times to radiate.”
I was thoroughly charmed by this book. The setting is very specific—upstate New York in the mid-1980s. The atmosphere is a throwback to a time that persists in very few places, all granola, recycling, public radio, literacy, liberation, self-discovery and the social contract. Think Lauren Groff’s Arcadia. Spheres is Amy Schutzer’s second novel. Her first,Undertow, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, a Violet Quill Award finalist, and won a Today’s Librarian “Best of 2000” Award. A poetry chapbook, Taking the Scarecrows Down, was published in 2011 by Finishing Line Press. As for Spheres of Disturbance, the highest praise I can offer is this: I yearn to know these people, this community. I want them to exist in the physical plane, not just in Schutzer’s mind, and now my own. I would gladly join their world.
Michelle Newby, wandering Texan and recovering hedge funds paralegal, has been blogging and reviewing at www.texasbooklover.comsince 2010. Her reviews regularly appear in Monkeybicycle and are forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine and the Concho River Review. She is at work on her first collection of short fiction.
Reviewed by Michelle Newby
“Death is the final stroke of randomness, and we must wait for it, isn’t that what we’re told?” writes Amy Schutzer in Spheres of Disturbance, a sweetly affecting story of the last day of Helen’s life. The novel shifts between nine points of view, among them Helen’s daughter Sammy, an almost long-lost sister Rosie, Avery the poet, and a pregnant Vietnamese pot-bellied pig christened Charlotta. Most of the story unfolds at Avery’s garage sale, where seemingly the entire town makes an appearance and an all-woman band from the local lesbian farm collective provides the entertainment, usually musical.
Make no mistake--Spheres is by no means all sweetness and light. Helen is losing a battle with breast cancer that has metastasized to her bones and lungs. She has chosen this day to die. Our culture doesn’t know what to do with sickness, much less death. It’s as if ill health were a personal failing, a question of morality, of will. The “right to die” is a controversial and difficult topic; questions of personal autonomy always are. Helen’s daughter Sammy has spent the last couple of years in serious denial and at the beginning of this book believes that Helen should live for her, if for no other reason. No one is allowed to breathe the word “death” in Sammy’s presence, and this is damaging all her relationships. We follow along as Sammy makes the journey to a certain acceptance, if not peace.
You won’t read Spheres for plot and action. You will read Spheres for the diversity of characters and their completeness, for the complexity of relationships and community ties, for the sheer joy of skillful, precise, somehow intuitive language. Words are important in this book, both to the characters and to the author. Words are carefully chosen. For example, this passage comes from a scene between Sammy and Avery in which Sammy is flirting with taking down the wall that protects her from her mother’s imminent death:
She stands close. Not touching, just before touching. Knees close and thighs close and the buttons of their coats close. Sammy removes her hands from her pockets, from the box of cough drops and a flat green stone. The wind is in her palms and it is cold. Avery wishes those hands would rise up like leaves and land softly on her skin. But there is no hurrying Sammy. She unfolds her hands like flowers, each finger from the palm.
I was delighted by Schutzer’s powers of description, often pastoral but unexpectedly sharp. “Daylight seeps through the weeping willows with their breathy leaf curtains and strikes.” Charlotta the pig snorting along in the wake of Avery and Joe, discovering where they’ve been:
Dirt with oak leaves and linden, Cheerios, coffee grounds, flakes of alfalfa, and sweet, sweet apples. Joe. Where does he go? She doesn’t know. But where he goes has tickling grass, pine needles, dried-up dog doo, and something sweet…sweet but not apples.
Schutzer conveys a myriad of meanings in a single passage. “The man next to Rosie extends his hand. On his wrist hangs an oversized gold watch that includes several smaller dials within the larger blue face. It’s a watch that says the man wearing it will compare it to Joe’s, a Mickey Mouse Timex Darla gave him for his birthday, and draw conclusions.” There are also flashes of humor like this one: “…her mom is dying, though the word itself is so taboo that the doctors, the hospital, the American Cancer Society call it a battle instead. A war. There are cheerleaders…You can beat this, yes you can! Two, four, six, eight: only three more times to radiate.”
I was thoroughly charmed by this book. The setting is very specific—upstate New York in the mid-1980s. The atmosphere is a throwback to a time that persists in very few places, all granola, recycling, public radio, literacy, liberation, self-discovery and the social contract. Think Lauren Groff’s Arcadia. Spheres is Amy Schutzer’s second novel. Her first,Undertow, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, a Violet Quill Award finalist, and won a Today’s Librarian “Best of 2000” Award. A poetry chapbook, Taking the Scarecrows Down, was published in 2011 by Finishing Line Press. As for Spheres of Disturbance, the highest praise I can offer is this: I yearn to know these people, this community. I want them to exist in the physical plane, not just in Schutzer’s mind, and now my own. I would gladly join their world.
Michelle Newby, wandering Texan and recovering hedge funds paralegal, has been blogging and reviewing at www.texasbooklover.comsince 2010. Her reviews regularly appear in Monkeybicycle and are forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine and the Concho River Review. She is at work on her first collection of short fiction.
Rain Taxi
reviewed by Laura Maylene Walter
Summer 2014
A pregnant pot-bellied pig, a life-sized Elvis cutout, and a garage sale hoedown might share space in Amy Schutzer’s novel Spheres of Disturbance, but quirkiness aside, the novel also grapples with far more solemn subjects: the inevitability of death, the renewal of life, and how characters either confront or avoid mortality.
Spheres of Disturbance is structured in short chapters that alternate points of view. While the cast of characters is large and, at times, a bit unwieldy, the heart of the novel’s action surrounds the poet Avery, her girlfriend Sammy, and Sammy’s dying mother, Helen. As Avery prepares to host a garage sale that morphs into a full-blown neighborhood hoedown, Helen, a terminal cancer patient, makes plans to end her life on her own terms. Sammy, meanwhile, is willfully oblivious of the fact that her mother is dying and does all she can to distract herself from this reality.
The novel’s other myriad plot lines trickle into new territory like so many tributaries: Helen’s estranged family members, who long ago cast her from their home, seek her out in her last days; Avery struggles to maintain her relationship with Sammy while facing tension with an ex-girlfriend; and fifteen-year-old Darla comes of age to discover she, too, might be a lesbian.
That Spheres of Disturbance is consumed with life as much as death can also be observed in the surprising form of Charlotta, Avery’s Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. As the only non-human character granted a point of view in the novel, this pig and her gentle charm nearly steal the show. Charlotta is heavily pregnant and waits for the birth of her piglets with quiet resignation as the party carries on around her:
She drifts, her eyes soft, staring out the door’s window; dusk settles in. The red light bulb is on outside and casts a rosy blush. The snow falls through the light like powdered sugar. The scent of wood smoke swirls with the wind that enters each time the front door is opened and closed. Wind and wood smoke, snow-tinged, brisk, and merry as the river. Curly patterns, lovely smells. Her eyes close as if something—the snow, the wind—has closed them for her, and the pinky light from the bulb outside has taken up residence inside her. What sweetness to roll in crackly red maple leaves and scout the woods for odorous morsels? There is more mud and fungi and the loot of decay, and Charlotta is drooling when the two girls find her napping.
Set in late autumn, the novel skillfully mirrors death through the changing seasons: as the book progresses, the temperature drops and the first snowfall drapes the world in white. These natural details call attention to Schutzer’s luminous prose: “The maple and linden leaves continue to pour down and scurry in circles. The river carries them like streamers. Many rise, like flames, off the water, then settle down for a long drift.” And Helen’s serene moment of viewing the newly fallen snow creates a moment of both peace and surrender: “She looks outside at the snow, and all of a sudden she is in tears, joyful. This is a last bit of good fortune, to witness the grace of snow, as nature surrenders to it, to be buried beneath its beauty without resistance.”
If the novel’s momentum feels a bit stagnant at times, or the ever-rotating point-of-view characters overwhelming, it is the persistence of the novel’s inevitabilities—birth, death, community, life, love, anger, and forgiveness—that come together to create the striking and beautifully ambiguous ending that lays to rest the complexities of the characters’ struggles and pleasures.
reviewed by Laura Maylene Walter
Summer 2014
A pregnant pot-bellied pig, a life-sized Elvis cutout, and a garage sale hoedown might share space in Amy Schutzer’s novel Spheres of Disturbance, but quirkiness aside, the novel also grapples with far more solemn subjects: the inevitability of death, the renewal of life, and how characters either confront or avoid mortality.
Spheres of Disturbance is structured in short chapters that alternate points of view. While the cast of characters is large and, at times, a bit unwieldy, the heart of the novel’s action surrounds the poet Avery, her girlfriend Sammy, and Sammy’s dying mother, Helen. As Avery prepares to host a garage sale that morphs into a full-blown neighborhood hoedown, Helen, a terminal cancer patient, makes plans to end her life on her own terms. Sammy, meanwhile, is willfully oblivious of the fact that her mother is dying and does all she can to distract herself from this reality.
The novel’s other myriad plot lines trickle into new territory like so many tributaries: Helen’s estranged family members, who long ago cast her from their home, seek her out in her last days; Avery struggles to maintain her relationship with Sammy while facing tension with an ex-girlfriend; and fifteen-year-old Darla comes of age to discover she, too, might be a lesbian.
That Spheres of Disturbance is consumed with life as much as death can also be observed in the surprising form of Charlotta, Avery’s Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. As the only non-human character granted a point of view in the novel, this pig and her gentle charm nearly steal the show. Charlotta is heavily pregnant and waits for the birth of her piglets with quiet resignation as the party carries on around her:
She drifts, her eyes soft, staring out the door’s window; dusk settles in. The red light bulb is on outside and casts a rosy blush. The snow falls through the light like powdered sugar. The scent of wood smoke swirls with the wind that enters each time the front door is opened and closed. Wind and wood smoke, snow-tinged, brisk, and merry as the river. Curly patterns, lovely smells. Her eyes close as if something—the snow, the wind—has closed them for her, and the pinky light from the bulb outside has taken up residence inside her. What sweetness to roll in crackly red maple leaves and scout the woods for odorous morsels? There is more mud and fungi and the loot of decay, and Charlotta is drooling when the two girls find her napping.
Set in late autumn, the novel skillfully mirrors death through the changing seasons: as the book progresses, the temperature drops and the first snowfall drapes the world in white. These natural details call attention to Schutzer’s luminous prose: “The maple and linden leaves continue to pour down and scurry in circles. The river carries them like streamers. Many rise, like flames, off the water, then settle down for a long drift.” And Helen’s serene moment of viewing the newly fallen snow creates a moment of both peace and surrender: “She looks outside at the snow, and all of a sudden she is in tears, joyful. This is a last bit of good fortune, to witness the grace of snow, as nature surrenders to it, to be buried beneath its beauty without resistance.”
If the novel’s momentum feels a bit stagnant at times, or the ever-rotating point-of-view characters overwhelming, it is the persistence of the novel’s inevitabilities—birth, death, community, life, love, anger, and forgiveness—that come together to create the striking and beautifully ambiguous ending that lays to rest the complexities of the characters’ struggles and pleasures.
Lambda Literary Review
reviewed by Stephanie Glazier
November 9, 2014
For the past several days, I’ve been reading the world as a pig might, low and loud, in Amy Schutzer’s Spheres of Disturbance. I’ve waited for my breakfast behind the garage door—looking up so hopefully at the handle; I’ve listened, bewildered, at humans exchanging paper for cloth and other paper— Charlotta, the very pregnant pot bellied pig, is one of the characters with other rotating voices, human voices, in Spheres of Disturbance. Her voice lends levity (and a different, sensory gravity) to a book exploring the decisions families and the ailing make about death–how much agency we each have and should have at the end of our lives, who cares for us and at what price.
Helen, our tenacious central speaker, is in the last stages of an aggressive cancer. She’s told again and again the disease is surmountable, though her body and test results offer little support of such optimism. Helen’s hatched but ultimately unnecessary plan to end her own life is a kind of open secret in our story. “The nightstand holds her medicines. Only she calls them her potions. There is the half-empty glass of water flanked by the pill bottles. Surrounded. Give up. Take me now. Who cares about the order of things?” Schutzer is careful to place us there with Helen, making us feel the wash of time spent in an ailing body.
Sammy, Helen’s daughter and caretaker, remains in denial about her mother’s diagnosis, turning her attention to the dailyness of providing for Helen. The short vignette-like chapters, wind around Sammy and her lover, Avery’s, relationship, their fissured response to Helen’s illness— here, an excerpt from a Sammy chapter: “That’s the AND that Avery is all about. It is a word of give and take and understanding. Sammy starts to cry again. She pushes herself up off the floor onto her knees.Her nose drips. Her toes are still cold. She’ll have to enter the garage soon. And then what? She’ll have to find Avery and tell her, you’re right, my mom is dying. And she’ll have to go to her mom and allow her to die.”
Helen’s family of origin, is another narrative thread, coming back into her life, uninvited, after many years of absence. Joe, another of Helen’s caretakers, figures prominently as her chosen family, reminding us that family is what we say it is.
The big strength of Spheres of Disturbance, (other than the pleasure and height of Schutzer’s language, a lyricism we find when a poet writes a novel) is its network like mode of storytelling—these short chapters achieve a facet like quality—light from different angles, illuminating a stone. The form of the novel illustrates the interconnectivity of Helen’s community, brought together by a garage sale in the course of one day. We watch those who love her rise and fail for Helen, trying in their ways, to support her.
I had a big reaction to this novel. I finished it in the house of a friend and wept openly in front of her basset hound at my feet— for the beauty of it, for the questions it raised in me: when I come to the end of my life, what will I relish, what will I regret, who will care for me? To have children or not to have children? This story, especially for queers (I don’t love this word and lack a better one that means all of us), disturbs our ideas about the end of our lives, about how death goes—it invites us to ask ourselves what we want, for our lives and our deaths. - See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/11/09/spheres-of-disturbance-by-amy-schutzer/#sthash.ycYvmtuK.dpuf
reviewed by Stephanie Glazier
November 9, 2014
For the past several days, I’ve been reading the world as a pig might, low and loud, in Amy Schutzer’s Spheres of Disturbance. I’ve waited for my breakfast behind the garage door—looking up so hopefully at the handle; I’ve listened, bewildered, at humans exchanging paper for cloth and other paper— Charlotta, the very pregnant pot bellied pig, is one of the characters with other rotating voices, human voices, in Spheres of Disturbance. Her voice lends levity (and a different, sensory gravity) to a book exploring the decisions families and the ailing make about death–how much agency we each have and should have at the end of our lives, who cares for us and at what price.
Helen, our tenacious central speaker, is in the last stages of an aggressive cancer. She’s told again and again the disease is surmountable, though her body and test results offer little support of such optimism. Helen’s hatched but ultimately unnecessary plan to end her own life is a kind of open secret in our story. “The nightstand holds her medicines. Only she calls them her potions. There is the half-empty glass of water flanked by the pill bottles. Surrounded. Give up. Take me now. Who cares about the order of things?” Schutzer is careful to place us there with Helen, making us feel the wash of time spent in an ailing body.
Sammy, Helen’s daughter and caretaker, remains in denial about her mother’s diagnosis, turning her attention to the dailyness of providing for Helen. The short vignette-like chapters, wind around Sammy and her lover, Avery’s, relationship, their fissured response to Helen’s illness— here, an excerpt from a Sammy chapter: “That’s the AND that Avery is all about. It is a word of give and take and understanding. Sammy starts to cry again. She pushes herself up off the floor onto her knees.Her nose drips. Her toes are still cold. She’ll have to enter the garage soon. And then what? She’ll have to find Avery and tell her, you’re right, my mom is dying. And she’ll have to go to her mom and allow her to die.”
Helen’s family of origin, is another narrative thread, coming back into her life, uninvited, after many years of absence. Joe, another of Helen’s caretakers, figures prominently as her chosen family, reminding us that family is what we say it is.
The big strength of Spheres of Disturbance, (other than the pleasure and height of Schutzer’s language, a lyricism we find when a poet writes a novel) is its network like mode of storytelling—these short chapters achieve a facet like quality—light from different angles, illuminating a stone. The form of the novel illustrates the interconnectivity of Helen’s community, brought together by a garage sale in the course of one day. We watch those who love her rise and fail for Helen, trying in their ways, to support her.
I had a big reaction to this novel. I finished it in the house of a friend and wept openly in front of her basset hound at my feet— for the beauty of it, for the questions it raised in me: when I come to the end of my life, what will I relish, what will I regret, who will care for me? To have children or not to have children? This story, especially for queers (I don’t love this word and lack a better one that means all of us), disturbs our ideas about the end of our lives, about how death goes—it invites us to ask ourselves what we want, for our lives and our deaths. - See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/11/09/spheres-of-disturbance-by-amy-schutzer/#sthash.ycYvmtuK.dpuf
Praise for Undertow
“Like reading James Joyce filtered through William Faulkner ... a lyrical and powerful examination of the nature of love.”
—Statesman Journal
“[A] lyrical first novel.” —Utne Reader
“Schutzer’s characterization is artful.... Recommended for all public libraries.”
—Library Journal
“The book chronicles a lesbian love, but its universal message about relationships and family life is found in every page.”
—Today’s Librarian
“Schutzer’s strange and engrossing characters add to the appeal of this imaginative review.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This novel is beautifully written; its colors swirl and ebb like the rhythms of poetry … a wonderfully evocative novel.”
—Brigit Well’s Newsletter
“Jeanette Winterson has said good writing isn’t about brilliant words but putting together simple words in a brilliant way. Undertow supports that.”
—Just Out
“...a pageturner…for those who want an intense literary experience, one that challenges and broadens them.” —Texas Triangle
“Undertow is a lyrical premier…” —Lesbian Review of Books
“…fresh, original, and real. A poetic and authentic exploration of heartbreak and healing.” —Ellen Bass, author of The Courage to Heal
“Like reading James Joyce filtered through William Faulkner ... a lyrical and powerful examination of the nature of love.”
—Statesman Journal
“[A] lyrical first novel.” —Utne Reader
“Schutzer’s characterization is artful.... Recommended for all public libraries.”
—Library Journal
“The book chronicles a lesbian love, but its universal message about relationships and family life is found in every page.”
—Today’s Librarian
“Schutzer’s strange and engrossing characters add to the appeal of this imaginative review.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This novel is beautifully written; its colors swirl and ebb like the rhythms of poetry … a wonderfully evocative novel.”
—Brigit Well’s Newsletter
“Jeanette Winterson has said good writing isn’t about brilliant words but putting together simple words in a brilliant way. Undertow supports that.”
—Just Out
“...a pageturner…for those who want an intense literary experience, one that challenges and broadens them.” —Texas Triangle
“Undertow is a lyrical premier…” —Lesbian Review of Books
“…fresh, original, and real. A poetic and authentic exploration of heartbreak and healing.” —Ellen Bass, author of The Courage to Heal
