Claire Luchette is the author of Agatha of Little Neon and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. Their work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, VQR, Ploughshares, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, and others. Claire is a 2024-25 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and was the 2022-23 Rona Jaffe Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. They’ve received grants and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, MacDowell, Yaddo, and others. They studied at Brown University and the MFA program at the University of Oregon and teach creative writing at Binghamton University. Their second novel, Swans, is forthcoming from FSG.
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Agatha of Little Neon: A Novel
We didn’t know much about addiction, about homelessness, but we knew how it could look. We’d watched a man nod into his own lap in the Tim Hortons on Abbott Street, had seen kids hawk lone red and white carnations in plastic sleeves to drivers on the interchange off-ramp. We’d heard the spellbound murmurs of the woman who sat all day at the bus shelter on Fillmore. We offered these people things we thought they’d want. Some days one said yes to a cheeseburger or a Filet-O-Fish or a hot coffee, and other days no one wanted anything but whatever coins and cash we had.
We were many times not helpful at all. One winter, Mary Lucille came across a man asleep next to the grocery carts in the Tops lot. She tapped him on the shoulder and asked, when he roused, if he wanted a ride to the shelter. He shook his head. Or, she said, she could take him to McDonald’s for a chicken sandwich, or fries, or a parfait.
“A parfait?” the man said. He squinted at her. “What the hell is a parfait?”
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Agatha of Little Neon: A Novel
In class I talked about the triangle. Everything good comes in threes, I said: the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost; frankincense, gold, myrrh. In the case of triangles: angles, lines, and vertices. The girls drew triangles on the board and named them: BLT; breakfast, lunch, dinner; Beyoncé, Kelly, Michelle.
I took it all too seriously, maybe. I spoke of congruent shapes in reverent tones; how special, how beautiful, that two shapes might coincide completely when superimposed.
The students took turns tracing the outlines of each other’s bodies, and then shrank them to scale. This activity was meant to demonstrate the ratio of the girl’s shape to her miniature.
I don’t know what I was thinking. What kind of dolt forced a bunch of girls to stare long and hard at their own bodies, then imagine what it’d be like if they took up less space?
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Agatha of Little Neon: A Novel
At first, we were gentle and sweet. “Are you in labor?” Frances asked, and Mary Lucille stroked Mickey’s hair.
Mickey could only howl.
And then we were no longer sweet. Everything announced itself to us with urgency: the droop of Mickey’s wet pants; her lips, pale and raw. Our knowledge of birth came from the movies. About the pain, we asked how long, what kind, how big, and her answers came as moans. I pressed the artery in her wrist and counted its swell.
When we told Mickey we’d better take her to the hospital, she opened her eyes and seemed to notice us for the first time. “Sisters,” she said. “Am I gonna die?”
The ambulance dispatcher reported that Woonsocket’s ambulance was stuck in the snow. “Try a cab,” the operator said. “Or a friend.”
Empire Cab, Orange Cab, Island Cab, and Mr. Taxi quoted Frances hourlong waits. “Eight inches of snow, honey,” one of the men told her.
Mickey spat swears like seeds.
And then we ran to the door to see the indomitable vehicle charge down the sidewalk, bright and brave and undeterred by snow: the gleaming orange lawnmower, and oh, yes, perched upright on the seat, gallant and brilliant in her sequins, was Lawnmower Jill, her bare arms pink. We watched her come to a stop outside the Tedeschi, and Horse handed her a beer.
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“More meditation than story, prayer than novel, Luchette’s book is the sort that in crystalline minimalist prose with nary a comma out of order, evokes midcentury existentialist classics. . . . This is the most moving book about grace and what it means to whisper a silent prayer to nobody that I read this year.” —Ed Simon, The Millions [on Agatha of Little Neon]
“Compelling. . . . Agatha of Little Neon reaches that goal which all novels fundamentally pursue—saying something authentic and essential about the human experience—and does so with verisimilitude and the grace that comes with living simply.” —D.W. White, Chicago Review of Books
“Agatha of Little Neon is the rare kind of book that reads like a transmission from a person you don’t know, but who is already nestled close to your heart. Full of small devotions, pith and vigor, and a bounty of tender feeling for a world that is not quite as full of grace as it could be, this bold debut shines with a light all its own and announces Claire Luchette as a true original and a voice to follow closely.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Tender, unassuming, wise, Claire Luchette’s portrait of a halfway house of Catholic nuns in a small Rhode Island town that doesn’t particularly want them is laugh-out-loud funny and proves that great charm does not preclude great depth. This writer is a portraitist of the overlooked, the ungovernable, the believers trying to take their wobbles of faith in stride. Accepting our fundamental condition of loneliness, Luchette traces a path through it to profound fellowship.