Maude Hutchins Libri

The story follows Noel, an orphan raised in a whimsical household featuring a flute-playing grandfather, a spinster aunt, and an array of eccentric characters. Set between a country estate and a desert sanitarium, it explores Noel's capricious nature and her capacity for love amidst a tapestry of vivid personalities. Maude Hutchins' imaginative narrative weaves through various realms of space, time, and memory, showcasing her fantasy-building prowess and the enchanting world surrounding Noel.

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.