Victorine

"Victorine has its own feral brilliance ... Hutchins can write with perverse and often disquieting power." - The London Review of Books

Victorine is 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.

The eponymous 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.

Profoundly human and recognizable - yet discomforting, chilling and disturbing.

"The writing here is brilliant, glittering and exciting ... scented decadence and surrealistic bizarrerie reveal a special talent and a very special taste ... precious and perverse" - Kirkus

"Maude Hutchins, an all but forgotten American writer, brings an extraordinary clarity to her descriptions. Her prose is sparse and vivid. She writes as if her nerve endings are in her pen. Colours, tastes, smells, sounds, touches pour onto the page." - The Irish Times

'Maude Hutchins has a forcefully genuine talent... She is among the most imaginatively creative women writing in English.' - The New York Times

'Victorine established [Hutchins] reputation as a richly ironical imagist' - Time Magazine

About the author

Maude Phelps McVeigh Hutchins is considered one of the foremost practitioners of nouveau roman in the English language. Hutchins is best known today for her sexual coming-of-age novel Victorine.

Hutchins published several experimental poems and plays in the 1930s and 1940s - including Diagrammatics (1932) with Mortimer Adler, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Hutchins first novel, Georgiana, appeared in 1948, the year of her divorce, and was quickly followed by A Diary of Love (1950), Love Is a Pie (1952), My Hero (1953), The Memoirs of Maisie (1955), Victorine (1959), Honey on the Moon (1964), Blood on the Doves (1965) and The Unbelievers Downstairs (1967). She published stories and poems in the New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Harper's Bazaar and other popular magazines, and later collected some of her short fiction in The Elevator (1962).

As a trained and popular artist, Hutchins had many gallery shows, including several at the Albert Roullier Galleries in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Wilderstein and America Fine Arts society galleries in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Grand Central Art Galleries, the St. Louis Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, the New Haven Paint and Clay club, and others. She also was picked, along with two others, to represent Illinois at the third annual National Exhibition of American Art. In addition to this honor, some of her work was exhibited at a show of modern art at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.

Maude Phelps McVeigh Hutchins died on March 28, 1991 in Fairfield, Connecticut.