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Victorine

Victorine

by Maude Hutchins, introduction by Terry Castle

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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.Maude Hutchins, introduction by Terry Castle

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590172704
Pages: 224
Publication Date:

Praise

Maude Hutchins has written a number of books and they are all very good.
— Anaïs Nin

Maude Hutchins writes like a lascivious I. Compton-Burnett.
Time

Maude Hutchins has a forcefully genuine talent....She is among the most imaginatively creative women writing in English.
— Terry Southern

If a Colette were possible in this country, that is presumably what Maude Hutchins would like to be. The sensuous is her window on the world; sexuality is the sea for all her voyages...
New York Times

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