The folks who pick National Book Award finalists took a dose of criticism last year for their five selections, and Christine Schutt, one of the lucky authors, has taken some shots of her own.

Schutt's Florida is one of those books that makes you angry for reading it. It's short, 156 pages, cuts quickly from scene to scene, and at times breezes through what seem like years - important years - in the life of the main character: Alice Fivey.

But Schutt also manages to do in those 156 pages what many authors fail to do in longer works: render in a truly lyrical and poetic way the lives of a half-dozen people living out ordinary years with ordinary failings.

The story focuses around a 7-year old girl - Alice - who is shuttled back and forth among relatives while her mother sits in mental facility. Her father had died years earlier. The relatives who are left to raise Alice seem like the ones you would try to avoid at a family gathering: materialistic in many ways and all with a knack for bad-mouthing people behind their backs. In between Schutt sprinkles a couple of kinder folks - like Alice's longtime "driver" Arthur - who work to pull the story back to a moral center.

Stacked against books that did win the National Book Award (like Saul Bellow's Herzog or Joyce Carol Oates' Them)
Florida lacks the intellectual and emotional punch of a story with truly tragic characters and stories. But that's almost unfair competition for anyone.

Schutt uses a writer's most important weapon - language - to paint thought pictures rather than tell a heavy story. (Sure, a little girl seeing her mother hauled off to a mental home after her father dies should read like a heavy story, but Florida doesn't punch you in the gut.)

It's a good book and worth reading. Schutt is a master of the English language, which is never an easy job. And when you finish you'll want to read it again, if only to see if you missed what may have been, should have been, a deeper story. And if only to see if your anger is misplaced on such a lyrical work.