I'm always drawn to stories about Hollywood - seedy side or not - so it was a no-brainer to pick up this collection of short stories. Unfortunately it turned out not to pay off. I don't mind a weird or quirky set of stories, but these were too cold and I felt too distanced as a reader. Sadly, not for me.

I think short story collections can be very hit and miss and unfortunately this was a miss for me. I did not enjoy the majority of the short stories and while some did show promise, overall I think the collection was just not strong enough to hold my attention.

This collection of short stories definitely provide food for thought. While they weren't necessarily all about Holly they did give us a sneak peak into the dysfunctional lives of some of the rich and famous. It highlight how lives can be ruined through misuse of alcohol, how marriages entered into frivolously quite likely will end in tears, about the tough demands of motherhood, about love, and loss and so on. So many themes appeared here, dealt with beautifully in exquisite prose that held me focused from the beginning of each take to the final word. They were each superb in length, the stories were concise and whole enough to get a feel for the character without requiring extensive details. These stories really were very enjoyable. I highly recommend.

These tales were interesting, but not my cup of tea. I think that half of me went along with the words in these stories, but the other half was confused by the writing. Some sentences I had to go back and read again because I was thinking that I had the wrong word. To me, it looked like some words maybe were repetitive so the author had to use a synonym to make sure it didn't repeat too much. I think that these actions caused the writing to simply not flow for me. If I have a hard time with a flow of a book, it's almost always a do not finish situation. However, I just powered through this one to see what each story entailed.

Some of the stories were alright, some of them were just plain dull. I think that this dullness was a contributing factor of the flow of the writing. If there's nothing interesting going on, and the words don't make sense, it seems that the dullness would be escalating per story. It was sometimes a struggle to get through. I hate to be so brutally honest, but I was glad that the stories were so short that I could finish them quickly.

I hope next time Christine Schutt just puts her thoughts out on paper without having to change her wording. It was confusing and just difficult to read. I would definitely give her another chance in the future to see if there are differences on how it could be better.

I don't tend to read a lot of short story collections, but usually when I do I remind myself that I really like them - this was not the case. I couldn't connect or care about any of the stories. The way I rate short story collections is if I have the feeling that I wish at least one or more of the stories were to be expanded into a full novel, then that is a good collection in my book. I couldn't find one story in this collection that I wanted more from.



I am going to keep this short and quick since I don't want to dwell on the negative. I would love to hear if you have read something else by Christine Schutt and if I should try something else?

The stories are good overall. However, the attempts are inner explorations of the characters only end up in confusion and ultimately, a bit underwhelming.

The stories dragged. Very slow and some were actually boring. I could not finish this book.Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book. Although I received the book in this manner, it did not affect my opinion of this book nor my review.

Though I liked the book, I made the decision when I finished not to review it on my site because it didn't fit into my editorial schedule. I may include it in a review post or possibly a book list post in the future.

I haven’t read a lot of short stories but the ones I enjoyed the most have concise punchy plots with thought-provoking themes and circumstances that stop and make you think. They invoke emotion, can make you scared, they leave an impression. Unfortunately with Pure Hollywood I wasn’t giving that for me. I struggled to read some of the stories because of the way that they have been constructed, I had to re-read paragraphs because I didn’t understand what was happening. I’m a seasoned reader and I struggled with the writing style. There were some absolute gem sentences surrounded by things that didn’t seem to make sense to me. I also noticed some of the stories had the same formula; a male and female going through the motions of something, but there was never really a beginning middle and end there was no real pivotal moment, there was no shoe dropping you just seem to be a section out of someone’s life that wasn’t the particularly interesting. They felt like very dull sections out of someone’s life who is fairly uninteresting.

I really wanted to enjoy pure Hollywood, but it was more of a chore than a pleasure to read. I think the author would be an excellent poet but perhaps short stories are not the right genre for them. I would like to thank netgalley for the opportunity to read and wish the author the best of luck with the publication

I didn't really feel that way about Christine Schutt's new collection, Pure Hollywood: And Other Stories . She's definitely a talented writer, and her use of imagery is tremendously poetic. But I found her writing style a bit evasive, so it was difficult for me to understand the characters' motivations, what was happening to them and why, and, at times, whether or not I should sympathize with them.

This is the first time I’ve read a book by acclaimed novelist and short story writer Christine Schutt, but she has a disarming and fascinating way of writing about self-consciousness, family and the passage of time. “Pure Hollywood” is a collection of short stories with the title story also being the longest. It’s an impressionistic tale of a brother and sister after the sister’s much older husband dies. He was a wealthy famous comedian, but she soon finds she’s shut out of any substantial inheritance and she’s forced to vacate the modernist home she inhabited like an abstract painting. The odd series of events which make up her life feel as if they’ve been crafted in a Hollywood film script so she forms an odd emotional distance from her own sense of being. This is a feeling that recurs throughout many of the stories in this book where the enormity of characters’ loves and losses have a sense of being scripted and so they are abstracted out of the personal. What’s left is the sordid and grimy reality that they inhabit like bemused spectators blinking in the sunlight after spending too long in a dark movie theatre.

The stories include a range of characters from an affluent young couple on holiday to men purchasing flowers for a garden to a widow harangued by her daughters about her growing drinking habit. But almost all the characters are accompanied by some sense of personal loss whether it’s a spouse or child. Gardens also frequently feature in the stories so running alongside these deaths are a proliferation of plants and flowers growing with stubborn insistence. Tied into this surrounding life is a sense of eroticism, but the presence of gardens isn’t necessarily comforting or benign. In ‘The Duchess of Albany’ it’s stated “The garden was not genteel.” In fact, two of the stories refer to the surrounding flora as “thuggish” as if they are mocking or bullying these survivors. Gardens must be tended and cared for, but also controlled and wrangled with just like the people in these characters’ unruly lives. The result is a bewitching mingling of imagery and sensations about how our relationships grow beautifully, but soon wilt or threaten to restrictively entangle us.

It’s interesting how some of the stories slip into the surreal. The story ‘Where You Live, When You Need Me?’ about a woman named Ella who is employed by a number of affluent mothers to care for their children is particularly intriguing. The narrator reports how this child carer is much trusted, but no one knows much about her. At the same time as Ella appears the body parts of unknown children start being found in KFC buckets. The story has a high-pitched unsettling edge while not giving any conclusions. It strongly reminded me of Schweblin’s anxiety-inducing novel “Fever Dream”. The shortest stories in this collection seem to be the ones where Schutt also takes the most narrative risks in a way which doesn’t always feel successful or satisfying. Yet these micro stories also left some unsettling concepts lingering in my mind such as ‘Family Man’ where a husband living a remote “country-quiet life” feels that “The past sleds behind him.” But, on the whole, it feels like longer stories allow Schutt the space to develop characters that will resonate more powerfully such as an imperious rich old horse rider named Mrs Pall-Meyer or an irascible highly sexed famous painter named Gordon. On the whole I enjoyed these stories which have a vertiginous power to disorient their reader and articulate the peculiar subtleties of conflicting emotions.

A book that weaves many tales of many characters who can be classified as nothing less than Flawsome! Great stories, great writing

I'm sorry I could only get half way into this book. It made no sense and just as you get into one story it ends. Thanks for letting me have the chance.

Cherie'

I should have known when I saw this book was blurbed by Otessa Moshfegh that I wouldn't like this book. I really disliked Moshfegh's short story collection Homesick for Another World and they were similar to the stories in this collection, although I don't have the same hatred of Pure Hollywood as I do for Homesick. Mostly I'm just wondering about these collections: what is the point?

Sometimes short story collections have themes that draw all the stories together. I honestly couldn't find one here. Other than the flat out disgusting parts. What is it with contemporary authors feeling it necessary to describe penises and genitals and sexual desire in the ugliest of terms and in the most unnecessary of situations?? The person will be sitting on the sofa and will be like "and then I remembered the first time he showed me that secret, red velvet part of him. he grabbed it and said this was for me and stroked himself between my thighs." and then will go back to having a conversation about pie. Like??? completely unnecessary and just disgusting.

I think I liked maybe one story throughout this whole thing called "The Hedges" but one out of maybe 14 just isn't enough. And most of these are short, barely a page long which makes it really, really hard to connect to a story. It's why most of these short stories failed.

All in all, I felt like this book was rushed to market, because the stories in it were not the best. I also feel like the writing in this was sloppy, because in most stories you could barely tell what was going on. I should have known when the rating was so slow before I began this that it was not going to be a good read. I absolutely cannot recommend Pure Hollywood.

I was unable to finish this book and thus will not be posting a full review on my blog. The language of this book was stilted, hard to follow and boring. I found that the POV was weird and I couldn't tell what character was driving the action, at times. Thank you for your consideration to allow me to review this book.

A collection of short stories is always a somewhat tricky proposition, with any collection I expect to find something of a mixed bag, some stories to like and some I will be less keen on. In the case of Pure Hollywood I can honestly say there was only one story I felt any real connection with. namely the tragic "The Hedges"I think I really struggled with the author's writing style, at times strangely verbose, and at others staccato and almost abrupt, and with a lot of repetition throughout. Some of the "stories" felt more like a scene or sketch lifted from a larger work, strangely incomplete in themselves but there was some cohesion in the collection as a whole, most notably the sense of isolation and the importance of appearance , which ties in well with the title of the book.

Pure Hollywood isn't glitzy or full of glamour. There's no flashbulb or red carpets. Instead, this collection is full of death and heartache. A young widow, a mother who can't connect with her child, a mysterious woman who cares for a neighborhood of children...these are stories of tragedy.

Christine Schutt is a talented writer who captures the dirty parts of life. These aren't stories for a casual reader. There is a darkness in each one.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

this book unfortunately was not for me and did not finish.

I just finished this anthology a week ago and literally can’t remember anything I read. To be honest, I basically forgot the whole thing as soon as I finished. None of the stories really stuck with me, and I couldn’t empathize or relate to any of the characters. The anthology was well written and well edited, just didn’t turn out to be even remotely my cuppa.

Received via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Pure Hollywood by Christine Schutt

Pure Hollywood proved to be a collection plagued by a wide spectrum of dullness. There were moments, mostly at the start of the collection, where overwrought prose ran rampant in a way that made no sense whatsoever. It was as if the author, Christine Schutt, had her trusty Word Thesaurus immediately on hand, ready to whip out at any moment to form absurd sentences instead of creating readable literature—as if her way of being “creative” was to write so evasively and nonsensically as to confuse the reader into thinking, “Damn, this MUST be the newest form of erudite art; I’ve got to HAVE it!” purely (sure, why not?—pun intended) because they don’t get it at all.
As many readers and writers know, Ernest Hemingway is famously quoted as saying: “If a writer knows enough about what he is writing, he may omit things that he knows, and the reader … will feel those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” I’m confident that this is not what you’ll find in Schutt’s Pure Hollywood. All of the stories seemed unfinished and covered in a blanket of gray soot. They were all a bit dreary (that’s fine) and very unfinished. There was very little shock factor in this collection at all, and what little there was wasn’t followed-up on, so the few moments of revelation turned out to be aimless, pointless, near-powerless punches that slipped off the skin like water, non-scathing and unmemorable.
The first story in the collection took up one-third of the space of the entire anthology and had literally only one moment of pure interest. You’ll know that moment when you get to it. I left “Pure Hollywood” behind feeling that moments of my life had been squandered in reading it. But, I pressed on.
The second story in this collection, “The Hedges,” begins as such:
The woman who had just been identified as attached to Dick Hedge looked pained by the clotted, green sound of her little boy’s breathing, an unwell honk that did not blend in with the sashaying plants and beachy-wet breeze of the island.
*raising hand* Umm, did you just try to say that a woman’s son was sick on the beach? I had to read that line at least three times just to extract some meaning from that sludge of words, almost senseless when mixed in that formula. That opening line alone was enough to make me say “Pass” on that story. BUT I pressed forward again. I ended up liking “The Hedges”—the story of a strangely unhappy young couple on vacation with their fussy toddler and the events on that vacation that led to an unfortunate event—far more than I liked any of the other stories, but I didn’t like everything about it. It read like an adult version of “Fun with Dick and Jane” (and the husband is even named Dick). If that was Schutt’s intent, it fell just short of being clever because it was somehow never fully realized. It read like an outline of a story with none of the goods filled in, and because of that I didn’t especially care about the family, particularly that toddler.
“The Duchess of Albany” was the absolute epitome of the word WASP(y) and held no interest for me whatsoever. It read easily, sometimes even jauntily, but in the end left absolutely no impact.
“Family Man” was a dull flash fiction about a dull man. Literally. That is all.
“Where You Live, When You Need Me” warranted only an annoyed side-eye glance and a curt flipping of the page. As far as I can tell, it said nothing about anything but still managed to be rather snobbishly WASPy. Are these people hiring a homeless woman whose full name they don’t even know to help them out around the homes they’re renting in “the Berkshires,” then contemplating their belief in God (for one ridiculously, pretty much ironically brief second) with nothing else said as if that was enough? The nerve. Nothing else to be said about this one.
“The Dot Sisters”—what for??
“Oh, the Obvious” drew me in because of the potential for irony implied in the title. There was some irony in the end that was tolerably well done.
In the end, Christine Schutt’s Pure Hollywood is a collection I’m sure most people can live without. This compilation of stories added nothing to the dialogue about anything, unless you are the kind of reader who enjoys a dry read of literary content the likes of which is sure to make future readers inexperienced with the genre cringe away from it. For me, it was fiction without a soul (except for, maybe, the second one). To give the best and most accurate analogy I can think of, this entire collection was written for and about extremely uptight Protestant-esque people of coin (probably family money) who would wear cardigans buttoned at the neck and drone on and on about the troubles with “the help.” Picture that person and you’ve got a pretty good idea of the audience for this short story collection. I struggled with what rating to give Pure Hollywood. In the end, 2 stars seemed fair enough, and I’ll move on with my life thinking no more about it. **