Prosperous Friends

“Prosperous Friends proves Schutt to be one of the finest stylists alive.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Artful . . . Astonishing . . . Piercingly real . . . The poetic concision and allusiveness of [Schutt’s] prose give the story more heft than a mere two-hundred pages would suggest. . . . Her sentences never waste a phrase or even a word. In these finely cut scenes . . . Schutt deals killing blows with such short, precise movements that at first you barely register the wound.”—The Washington Post

In her new novel, Christine Schutt, two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize for Fiction, delivers a musical, timeless, and original work on the spectacle of love.

Prosperous Friends follows the evolution of a young couple’s marriage as it is challenged by the quandaries of longing and sexual self-discovery. The glamorous and gifted Ned Bourne and his pretty wife, Isabel, travel to London, New York, and Maine in hopes of realizing their artistic promise, but their quest for sexual fulfillment is less assured. Past lovers and new infatuations, noetic desires, doubt, and indifference threaten to bankrupt the marriage. The Bournes’ fantasies for their future finally give way to a deepened perspective in the company of an older, celebrated artist, Clive Harris, and his wife, Dinah, a poet. With compassionate insight, Schutt explores the divide between those like Clive and Dinah, who seem to prosper in love, and those like Ned and Isabel, who feel themselves condemned to yearn for it.