Gary Lutz, Partial List of People to Bleach (Future Tense Books, 2007) )"After receiving
Partial List of People to Bleach, I thought that Gary Lutz was probably experimenting with some kind of Fluxus version of vanity publishing, deconstructing the book as a material object, pushing the text's tactility to further limits. And when a button fell out of the book I thought of "Street Map of the Continent," from Lutz's collection
Stories in the Worst Way, where a woman, sitting with a book in her lap, worked
the tip of an uncrooked paper clip into the gutter where the facing pages met, prying things loose: fingernail peelings, eyebrow hairs, pickings and outbursts and face-scrapings. Anything on the plane of the page itself—the immediate heedless presence of the previous reader in the form of abundances of shed hair, perhaps, or gray powderings of scalp—she swept onto the floor. She evacuated the books, then ran the vacuum cleaner. In the morning, the book went back to the library.And, in a kind of reverse echo, Lutz in his lecture "The Sentence is a Lonely Place" describes how, as a kid, a book was, for him, "a kind of steadying accessory, a prop, something to grip, a simple occupation for [his] hands" and how—a book splayed before him—he enjoyed
"beholding the comfortingly justified lineups and amassments of words... liked seeing words on parade on the pages." While he "never got in step with them...never entered into the processions," he became fascinated with the book as an object, as a receptacle, and
liked how anything small (a pretzel crumb, perhaps) that fell into the gutter of the book—that troughlike place where facing pages meet—stayed in there and was preserved. A book was...an acquisitive thing, absorbing, accepting, taking into itself whatever was dropped into it. An opened book even seemed... an invitation to practice hygiene over it—to peel off the rim of a fingernail, say, and let the thing find its way down onto a page. The book became a repository of the body's off-trickles, extrusions, biological rubbish and remains; it became a reliquary of sorts.If we trust Gaston Bachelard's dictum that a word is the "germ of a dream," and that a sentence is, as Lutz asserts, "a lonely place," then what of a paragraph, and, in turn, a book? William Gass would answer that written language, whether a sentence or a book, is a "container of consciousness." Is a book also a machine of flows and interruptions? Can we apply practices like "architecture" and "engineering" to the idea of a book? What about book as an organism? Doesn't the word "book," as the OED states, come from "a Germanic base usually taken to be relative to BEECH, as the wood of rune-tablets?" Doesn't the Latin word liber for "book" come from a word meaning the inner-rind of a tree? Lutz's chapbook in hand, my mind was aswirl with binding structures, margins, borders, graphic design, typography, etc. Notwithstanding Keith Smith, and countless other "artist's books" makers, these are the kinds of thoughts that only a book by Gary Lutz could provoke in a reader.
Partial List of People to Bleach is peopled by conveyor belt automatons, bubble-headed bureaucrats, cubicle drones, button-pressers, paper-chasers, and pencil pushers. They "heap all alone," as Lutz writes, into their "nerveless" thirties, or lumber along into their forties: an "era of untidying succors, foiled overhauls." Lutz's indelible portraits, achieved through telling details and deadpan delivery, are always a highlight. In "Home, School, Office," we discover the first of this theater of the deferred's cast: a teacher, who marvels at the "frictionless, rubber-limbed sleep" of one of his students, who scours his office carpet obsessively for "an elaborately coiled pubic hair." A woman in "I Was in Kilter with Him a Little" has
"skewy eyes, a dump of dulled hair. A sparge of moles on the neck, the shoulder." And another
has "a squall of dark hair, eyes a slubby brown" who "spoke through prim, petite teeth of favors she was owed." A detailed study could be done of Lutz's fascination with arms and forearms. One woman has "sweepy arms" while another's "upper arm was pale and asquish." We find one more thinking of
"an unblunt arm unsleeved in late autumn and within esteeming reach, though [she] had come to believe miserably in seeing arms not as the pathway to a person but as the route the body took to get as far afield of itself as it could." Ironically, these characters, though reduced by Lutz to mundane, even clinical details, still come vividly to life.
These nowhere men and women on the verge with invented names like Elek, Floke, and Aisler, if named at all, are characterized by their ennui, despair, and indifference, and their homes and communities reflect their feelings. They live in bland, vacant spaces and places, like the man in "I Was in Kilter with Him a Little" whose
"city was a recent thing built in pious mimicry of someplace else. The streets were named after other streets." These are anonymous, claustrophobic, and emotionally stifling spaces, where the overall cast is gray. It's a wonder these characters don't have the lyrics "We got to get out of this place, if it's the last thing we ever do," ringing in their heads.
Sex is always a desultory affair in Lutz's fiction. It is usually leaden, perfunctory, with acts much like performing a chore, a routine. One woman bemoans the time a lover
"twidged a slowpoke finger into where [she] still trickled against [her] will." In "Years of Age," a man offers men
"the luxury of witnessed private conduct." Sex is often a proof of distance rather than intimacy. Doubts curtail connection, forcing one character to ask,
"But if I say I felt something for her, would that make it sound as if I felt things in her stead, bypassing her completely?" If Gary Lutz were a songwriter he would be Bob Dylan, the young acerbic rascal of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, etc. Here's "Ballad in Plain D," from Another Side of Bob Dylan:
Of the two sisters, I loved the young.With sensitive instincts, she was the creative one.The constant scapegoat, she was easily undoneBy the jealousy of others around her. For her parasite sister, I had no respect,Bound by her boredom, her pride to protect.Countless visions of the other she'd reflectAs a crutch for her scenes and her society.And here in "Years of Age" is one of Lutz's characters also talking about two sisters:
My sisters had turned out to be women who wore their hair speculatively, lavishing it forward into swells, or loading it again with clips, barrettes. The younger worked for a store that still had a notions department, a dry-goods department, a toilet with a coin slot on the door. Her affections raced in undaring ovals around co-workers. The other lived on her own in a safehold of foldaways and one-player card games with crueler and crueler rules. She had a couple of dogs that she wanted to see something of the world.Like Dylan, Lutz is a master of the putdown. In a kind of warped sleight-of-hand, Lutz, with a few deft strokes, builds his characters up as he tears them down. One character "smelled like the exhaust fumes of a bus" while another has a "headful of unmastered mathematics and specialty of jests." And the husband in "I Was in Kilter with Him a Little" was "largely a passerby, minutely berserk in his bearing," who "had an unconsoling side... and couldn't count on sleep, on dreams, to get a done day butchered improvingly."
There are many ways to approach Lutz's
Partial List of People to Bleach. One may read it for its concise catalogue of obsessions, revel in its archaism- and neologism- filled lexicon ("roomth"? "alcoholature"? "bloodbeat"? "vegetabular?" Deciding which is which is only part of the fun), and savor every bit of exposition and scrap of dialogue. One could cherry pick sentences imagining Steven Wright delivering them. Sure Wright has lines like: "I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it," and "It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it,"
but Lutz has
"I might have kept going through life repeating: Consider the source," and "When you are no good at what you do, it does you no good to triumph at whatever you might come home to, either." Wright has: "I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering," but Lutz has:
"Days were not so much finished as effaced. You caught sight of new, roomy hours looming through the old. Then months more: months of fudging forward unfamished." Wright has: "In school, every period ends with a bell. Every sentence ends with a period. Every crime ends with a sentence," but Lutz has:
"What at first doesn't sit right might eventually stand at least to reason." Or one could place Lutz's fictions within the context of Deleuze and Guattari's idea of "minor literature," that is, the subversion of language within a language, or as Lutz describes it in "Six Stories," as
"saying something in a language that wasn't shot." I'm sure a whole PhD thesis could be written on how Lutz's fictions express "the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation" described in
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. It must be understood, however, that Lutz is not working with a "private" language of indecipherability or inaccessibility. Instead Lutz, always looking alive, tinkers with word kernels, allowing them to suggest movement, direction, etc., careful to avoid the hackneyed, inexact, sentimental, and imbues every sentence with texture, with a kind of vividness and intelligence that imprints itself on one's consciousness.
Partial List of People to Bleach is certainly a book of stories this reader needs in the worst way.» -
John Madera«Reading Gary Lutz can be an exhausting experience: his carefully rendered, off-centered constructions are so minutely prepared that they retain their architecture from word to sentence to paragraph to section to story. Lutz’s previous efforts—Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive—are conventional-length collections, but even though his new work,
Partial List of People to Bleach, is published pamphlet-style and contains only 7 stories in 56 pages, the prose-density is still so high that this thin, stapled collection honestly feels more satisfying than the earlier volumes. It’s sort of like the EPs that used to hold us between LPs.
“I kept waiting for someone to say something in a language that wasn’t shot.” Here, in brief, lies the primary aim of Lutz’s fictions.
A sentence begins in one way and place, then ends in an entirely separate emotional universe, yet never gratuitously, never “incorrectly.” Lutz’s inventiveness with language is perhaps best seen in his near-genius ability to pare down connotations within a sentence, as in the line
“Days were not so much finished as effaced” from “I Was in Kilter with Him a Little.” Throughout this collection, Lutz overtly battles cliché, in the process luring himself into fresh territory.
Partial List of People to Bleach is shockingly bereft of people, places, genders even—the things other stories typically take for granted. Lutz’s landscape is one of small cities, anonymous and gray. His view at most takes in three or four people at a time and most often two or less. With one exception, the entirety of this book is bereft of names, and even the one case of a named character—”Aisler”—isn’t a real name but only an invention of the narrator. All of the narrators (inevitably first-person) and most of the characters are pan-sexual. Even ages are uncertain: the age most cited is forty, as in the final, titular story: “Forty I was, then fortier.” The characters here are severely detached, attentive only to their private passions.
The only real landscape in this collection is the interior one. Such is the primacy of the interior that the narrator of “Home, School, Office” does not even disclose a gender; we are left with breadcrumbs of hints whose ambiguity nonetheless services the narrator’s emotional isolation. And at times the inner landscape is equally barren as the outer one. The narrator of “Years of Age” exemplifies this hopelessness, saying
“Or was I already taking the long view—that the world we lived in stood in the way of another world, one where you need not keep going back into things with your eyes wide open?”The longest story, “I Was in Kilter with Him a Little,” is also the most ambitious. In only 11 pages Lutz manages to contain the sweep of a life. Here the identifiably female narrator feints at emotional intimacy with a man time and again, only to come to the conclusion that
“Things allowed me mostly lowered me.” Intimacy exists, if at all, only in retrospect. In the end she takes up with a girl who was
“frank in her dreams, which she logged, but a liar in all other opportunities.” As in “I Was in Kilter,” the narrators of this collection inevitably settle for a modicum of comfort in a harrowingly inhospitable world of “plywooden hideaway housing.”
It’s worth noting that Lutz works mainly in succinct fiction, the opposite of Harold Brodkey, who believed that language reached rarefied emotional territory in long sentences, long books. Whereas Brodkey swoops and soars around and through, delimiting territory through paradoxically precise expansiveness, Lutz writes into the sentence, better achieving Musil’s dictum of “precision in matters of the soul” with enriched brevity. Still, he has managed to avoid the crutch of merely private language: the writing always remains accessible, and vulnerable.
In doing this, Lutz has mapped out his own territory somewhere amongst minimalism, postmodernism, metafiction, the avant-garde, and hysterical realism. You can try to place him among contemporaries such as David Foster Wallace and Ben Marcus, as Sven Birkerts does in his essay in
The Believer, “A New Prose Signal,” rightly claiming that Lutz’s stories
“map a most disconcerting loss of human certainty.” I mark another genesis:
The Quarterly. I first encountered Lutz in the heady days of Gordon Lish’s publication, along with Greg Mulcahy, Darryl Scroggins, Cooper Esteban, Rick Bass, and John Dufresne. That was the last magazine I watched the mailbox for, and I miss that anticipation and sense of true discovery.
“I Was in Kilter with Him” ends with a line worthy of Beckett:
“Then years had their say.” And so with Lutz, who publishes infrequently. Lutz bides his time with his publications, one senses, due to his high sensitivity to definition—both in terms of word-meanings and dimensions. In his fictions, when the reader double-takes on a sentence there’s a reward rather than confusion. If the human finds its uniqueness and origin in the place where language arises, then to reside in the human with enough patience and alertness to produce beautifully “kiltered” sentences is where Lutz pulls away from the crowd.» -
Daniel Whatley
Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way (Calamari Press, 2009)«These crucial, often darkly hilarious arraignments and instigations place before us a parade of defectives and solitaries, all running through the heart's entire repertory in pursuit of a fitting catastrophe of the self.
In "Certain Riddances," a cordovanned and cuff-linked office crank pushes his way into a final round of interoffice harassments. The sour-mouthed teenager of "SMTWTFS" comes down with a case of pointed, retaliatory homosexuality. In "Devotions," an offcast from couplehood recounts, in extremis, the downturns of three desolating marriages. The word-shy apartment dweller of "Esprit de l'Elevator" lets himself out of his sleep just long enough to explain away his suspicious solitudes to his neighbors. In "Not the Hand but Where the Hand Has Been," a guilt-ravaged father pours the secrets of his grown daughter's life into the narrow columns of the index he is compiling on the cheap for a university-press book he is certain no one will ever read.»
"Mr. Lutz comes from the same school as Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish, with the former's dirty-realist landscape and the latter's playful perversity. Yet he manages to create his own blend of the prosaic and the disordered, full of half-cliched twists and turns of phrase....Some [of his characters] reach a hypnotic pitch in their low-key soliloquies...but in the aggregate, the works they inhabit seem more like stylistic exercises than stories." -
Allen Lincoln"Lutz's view of the world in these works is so dismal even chronically cheerful people will want to blow their brains out after reading them... Other than marveling at the inventive way he slices and dices the mother tongue, we'd prefer to spend our time carving weird musings into our own flesh with a butcher knife — at least those wounds may eventually scab over. Lutz's darkly depressing images doubtless will fester in the mind forever." -
Tucson Weekly«Gary Lutz is a sentence writer from another planet, deploying language with unmatched invention. He is not just an original literary artist, but maybe the only one to so strenuously reject the training wheels limiting American narrative practice. What results are stories nearly too good to read: crushingly sad, odd, and awe-inspiring.» -
Ben Marcus«Gary Lutz is, simply, one of my favorite writers. I wish I could see through skin the way he can. He tells hard truths in thrilling ways; his startling sentences are often darkly funny, and always exactly right.» -
Amy Hempel«Gary Lutz is one of the rarest and purest of our treasured literary artists. His authentic language conquers any habit of speech. Let the reader prepare for the first known examples of the most crucial and intimate matters of the heart and mind.» -
Diane Williams«What can I say? This is the book. These are the stories, the sentences. Get ready for awe, for envy, for love. Gary Lutz is as funny and original a writer as we have in the language. Consider this, as Lutz would say, a 'household fact'.» -
Sam Lipsyte«Postmodern in tone and structure, the 36 short stories collected in this debut by Lutz are unremittingly grim, pretentious and oblique. More character studies than narratives, the pieces involve unsavory, self-hating characters: an antisocial college professor with an unfortunate bowel condition ("Slops"); an obsessive, gay office drone who spends his days secretly harassing his female co-workers ("Certain Riddances''); another gay man whose random promiscuity masks a deeper loneliness ("SMTWTFS''). The narratives themselves are static, if vivid, portraits. In "Waking Hours," a gay, divorced man with a dull new job instructing middle-management types on
"how to bestow awards on undeserving employees'' describes himself as
"self-devastated," and goes on to prove it: he has a strained meal with the "mothered-down version" of his young son; he believes that check-out clerks at the supermarket might truly understand him through eye-contact; he pays attention toand mimicsevery noise his fellow tenants make in his apartment building. In a grotesque, misogynist fable, "The Pavilion," a man devises "a
new angle on how to start a family," which essentially turns out to be hiring a woman, getting her pregnant and then, before an audience, pulling out her teeth and tongue while she gives birth. In spite of Lutz's flair with an airlessly ironic wit and occasional clever wordplay (an office worker's "extracubicular life"), these stories, all too unoriginally, live up to the collection's title. -
Publishers Weekly«Mordant debut collection of terse stories (some only a few paragraphs long), featuring a playful use of language in the service of a grim vision of contemporary life.
Lutz's protagonists are, typically, obsessive catalogers of life's minutiae, going through the motions at vaguely delineated jobs, baffled by life, between relationships and wondering, as one puts it,
"at what point people become environments for one another to enter." All of them would agree with the harassed character who stops the narrator of "When You Got Back" on a parking lot to complain cryptically that
"there was something unutterably troubling and unfinished about what had happened." In these tales, of course, the important things have happened long ago, and they happened somewhere offstage. What Lutz offers is the aftermath. In "Slops," a college professor in his
"shadowed, septic thirties," suffering from colitis, offers brief descriptions of the ways in which he keeps colleagues and students (
"the whole faceless, rostered population of them") at a distance. Indirectly, something larger, a sense of the haunted, hapless nature of the man, comes through. In "Recessional," the narrator (
"a shadow- slopping, chronically how-evering man") finds himself increasingly unable to utter even the simplest commands, to communicate at all, or to take action, and is reduced to precisely describing even the smallest gestures of those around him, as if to recapture his rapidly evaporating self. The problem is that the language these figures use, the exact, even prissy, descriptive monologues common to the pieces, is at first startling but quickly, across the span of many tales, becomes rather deadening. And the disaffected figures here, who seem at first both deeply alarming and memorable, begin to seem too much alike. There's no doubt that Lutz offers a distinctive, disturbing vision of an anomic world. But a little of this vision goes a very long way.» -
Kirkus Reviews«There is no finer writer of sentences than Gary Lutz; his sentences are both original and sublime. In “Waking Hours,” a story about a divorced middle-aged man who is often on the road, the protagonist describes his apartment:
“My life was cartoned off in three rooms and bath, one of several dozen lives banked above a side street. I convinced myself that there were hours midway through the night when the walls slurred over and became membranes, allowing seepages and exchanges from unit to unit.” With sentences like these, Lutz accomplishes two things. First, he forces his readers to slow down and relish the movement within each sentence. Second, his sentences force readers to reexamine the ordinary moments, the routine habits, of daily life. Throughout the collection, the first sentence often establishes the ethical inquiry of the story. “Slops” begins:
“Because I had colitis, I divided much of my between-class time among seventeen carefully chosen faculty restrooms, never following the same itinerary two days in a row, using a pocket notebook to keep track.” At a fundamental level, Lutz demonstrates that we understand the world through language. And, thankfully, Lutz is a careful observer. “Devotions,” a story whose protagonist has had a series of wives, begins, “From time to time I show up in myself just long enough for people to know they are not in the room alone,” and ends,
“What was wrong was very simple. Sometimes her life and mine fell on the same day.” Stories in the Worst Way is one of the finest short-story collections of the last decade.» -
Alan Tinkler«
What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life? In my case, there was a fixed sum of experiences… to or from which I could not yet add or subtract, but which I was skilled at coming to grief over, crucially, in broad daylight.So opens Gary Lutz’s first story collection—though “open” is perhaps not the verb to use about a book that has mostly stayed closed, dropping in and out of print over the past decade and acquiring only a small if passionate cult. We have names for writers as forcefully original as Lutz, none of them flattering: at worst, he’s pretentious or inaccessible, while at best he’s experimental, a word that always makes the reader-in-waiting wonder if it’s her patience that’s to be experimented upon.
And yet the impulse to wrench English into something only tenuously related to straightforward grammar and syntax is historically a popular, not an elite, pursuit, from Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll to Wodehouse on down to the best of our screenwriters and our comedians and our street kids playing “the dozens.” On this slender justification rests my hope that with this, its third sojourn into print, Lutz’s 1996 debut will stay there. This brilliant, thorny book should be a big deal for anyone interested in contemporary American fiction.
There’s a connection between the strangulated ingenuity of Lutz’s sentences and the stories of furtive, transgressive sex they give body to. He seduces words out of their typical usages, coaxes them into strange, unsustainable positions, and ends things before they can begin (36 stories in 160-odd pages); a sort of public-bathroom uneasiness hangs over the proceedings. Lutz’s sentence rhythms contract rather than cresting, and the stories generally end on a pinched note. “Slops” is fairly typical: a minor academic with colitis enjoys a highly ambiguous liaison with a student. Nothing about the story sounds promising, but Lutz manages both breathtaking stylistic accomplishment and humor in evoking a Comp 101 drone’s dark night of the soul:
There were no tests—just papers... But I read them hard, expecting sentences to have been spitefully spatchcocked into the running gelatinization of barbarisms and typos to check up on me, to see if I was actually reading. For instance: “Dear ‘Professor’” You fucking stink. Try wiping yourself once and [sic] awhile [sic]. Or didn’t they teach that were [sic] you went to school? Bag it.” But I never found such interludings.
“Spatchcocked,” “interludings,” “the running gelatinization”—Lutz’s absolute control over the language is all the transcendence these stories achieve. Much of the time, that’s enough.
That said, Lutz’s genius is of the kind that involves many extensions of credit. Some of the titles—“SMTWTFS,” an airless portrait of joyless promiscuity; “Waking Hours,” the story of a “self-devastated” man’s visit to his “mothered-down” son and his daily, intentional mimicry of the motions that his apartment-dwelling neighbors put themselves through—convey the repetitiveness of these stories’ themes. Read too fast, Lutz’s book melds into one composite portrait of a hermaphroditic, amorphously miserable office worker, coming to grief in broad daylight.» -
Philip Christman
Gary Lutz, I Looked Alive: Stories (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004)«In his second collection of short fictions, the fiercely original Gary Lutz details a fresh assembly of gravely wayward fusspots, downhearted smart alecks, tank-town boulevardiers, virtuosos of loneliness, underloved lovelies of unstable, contestable gender. Desperate for human contact, Lutz's unforgettable characters listen for noises coming through the walls as well as collect the scraps of hair and skin their lovers have left behind. Written in a tonic prose of singular precision, the twenty-four gorgeously perverse, intensely moving stories of
I Looked Alive place Lutz at the forefront of contemporary fiction's depictors of affection gone awry.
Lutz's first book,
Stories in the Worst Way, inspired Ben Marcus to pronounce him
"the new sad man of contemporary fiction." He details "speakers of every category and preference with a huge and painful humanity in common, possessing voices crisply original and knowing, funny and bitter and shellshocked."»
"From the same school as Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish, with the former's dirty realist landscapes and the latter's playful perversity." -
New York Times Book Review"At the end of one of Lutz's pieces I find it very difficult to offer up the traditional account of what has transpired… It is more that I have been seduced, if inconclusively, into a way of seeing." -
Sven Birkerts«In a previous post, I discussed some of the current conventions of book reviewing, concluding in part that "book reviewing in most print publications, both newspapers and magazines ...includes too little description of what the works reviewed actually do, what they are (aside from simple plot summaries), and too much glib evaluation." This judgment applies exponentially to Emily Barton's review of Gary Lutz's
I Looked Alive.
I must first say that I was mostly unfamiliar with Lutz's work until reading this new book, but having done so my own judgment of the book couldn't be in starker contrast to Emily Barton's. I liked it a lot. While Barton claims the stories make for "rather anhedonic reading," I found them on the contrary to be even rather moving on the whole, in addition to being structurally and stylistically challenging (the latter description being meant as a compliment.) It's the kind of book that requires patience in the beginning, but eventually becomes more compelling as you read it. But "experimental" fiction is often like that.
Even if I didn't like these stories so much, however, I would still have great problems with Emily Barton's review. It's reasonably short, so I will point out the lowlights in order, as they manifest themselves to the reader's notice. Although the review masquerades as a "description" of I Looked Alive, what passes for description is transparently a way of conveying to the reader that Lutz simply doesn't write fiction the way it ought to be written, according to the reviewer's assumptions, not as it should be done at all.
Barton immediately informs us that Lutz's fiction "is difficult to read (to some the mark of experimentalism, to others shoddy craftsmanship)..." The opposition between "experimentalism" and "craftsmanship" is patently obvious, of course, and we know before reading the rest of the review that we ought to avoid Lutz because he isn't a "craftsman." A craftsman doesn't write something that's "difficult to read." Never mind that this amounts to a wholesale rejection of the idea of experimental fiction in the first place, but it's a hopelessly reductive concept of what defines "craftsmanship" as well. If anything, experimental writers tend to be even more craftsmanlike in their approach, since what constitutes the "craft" of writing fiction is uppermost in their minds to begin with. Too many "well-made" stories or novels are not products of craft at all, but simple repetitions of formula.
Then there's "the fault of the narrative voice itself, which may make nominal switches from first to third person but sounds relentlessly the same from piece to piece." One of the blurbs printed on the book's back cover (from Sven Birkerts) suggests that
"the overall effect of a Lutz piece is not unlike what we experience reading a John Ashberry poem." This actually seems right to me. The structure and execution of Lutz's stories have at least as much in common with poetry as with fiction. Do we criticize poets because the "voice" in their poems "sounds relentlessly the same from piece to piece"?
This problem, from Barton's persective, is presumably related to the next: ""Lutz never provides the one, salient fact that would imbue a character with vigorous life, or even make him memorable." This is a very familiar lament of reviewers whose most basic assumption is that fiction will present us with "memorable" characters. In addition to being "craftsmen," fiction writers are also expected to be portrait painters in prose. Apparently this is the only thing that makes some readers interested in fiction in the first place, but of course the very notion of "experimental" fiction suggests that these ingrained expectations of what fiction is supposed to do are going to be challenged. If the writer isn't attempting to create memorable characters, it hardly seems a valid criticism to say that after all he doesn't do this. (Nevertheless, in my reading of these stories, several of the characters do stand out, and as a collective whole the characters in
I Looked Alive are memorable indeed.)
If Lutz can't deliver up memorable characters, how about his ability to tell a story? "[It's} hard to know, moment by moment, what a Lutz story is even about," Barton observes. Putting aside the fact that this largely isn't true, that it's perfectly easy to see what a given story is "about" as long as you at least temporarily abandon the assumption that a story must proceed "moment by moment," this criticism really takes us to Barton's core complaint about this book, which is further captured in this declaration: "Experimental fiction typically forgoes the comforts of storytelling in order to reveal the world in a new light. Sadly, Lutz reveals little." Thus Emily Barton would be willing to overlook the lack of storytelling, if the book would only conform in this other way to the conventions of realistic fiction, revealing the world through fiction's "light." But in fact experimental fiction doesn't first "reveal the world" in a new way. It attempts to reveal the possibilities of fiction in a new way. If it also gets us to look at the world differently, fine, but Barton puts her critical cart before the literary horse.
Perhaps the most damaging of Barton's criticisms, if it was true, is that Lutz "can't even write prose of middling intelligibility," fails to "maintain a crystalline clarity." Certainly Lutz could write prose of "middling intelligibility" if he wanted to, but he doesn't. He's deliberately confronting the standard of "crystalline clarity," asking why literary experiment can't include experiment with conventional uses of language. In the book's very first paragraph we are told by the narrator that "I had not come through in either of the kids. They took their mother's bunching of features, and were breeze-shaken things, and did not cut too far into life." This is not immediately "informative" in a "crystalline" way, but if you pause (and pause you must, throughout most of this book) and consider it, it makes perfect sense as a description of the way this man might see his children. It's just a "new" way of expressing features we are accustomed to seeing signalled in more familiar phrases.
One could decide that Lutz has failed in his experiments with language or character, that they don't accomplish what he seems to have set out to do, but it hardly seems useful to criticize him for even trying them out in the first place, which is what Emily Barton's review finally amounts to. Bookforum is in general an excellent publication, usually receptive to experimental writing. How disappointing that in this instance it is a forum for a reviewer so thoroughy uncomprehending of what experimental fiction is all about to begin with.» -
Daniel Green
“It was kind of surreal picking him at the airport. He looked very normal. His stories, too, were normal but at first they didn’t seem normal. At first they seemed experimental or put on (not a negative quality), but then gradually, they seemed perfectly reasonable. Gary Lutz uses language and syntax in a method perhaps suggested to him by Gordon Lish to shock the realistic story into something else. He doesn’t write allegorical or fantasy stories. He doesn’t write with OULIPO style constraints; rather his stories seem to me to balance both a perceived world and the nearly arbitrary difficulty of putting that perceived world into words. A similar effect occurs in a constraint novel, where the game of omitting something or following a rule in order to write throws makes the authors choices part of the story. However, where a constraint is a kind of operating parameter for the writer, Lutz exerts an aspect of mutilation. Gordon Lish was said to have gone too far in cutting down Raymond Carver’s
What We Talk about When We Talk About Love. Lutz, I think, shows a similar zeal for reshaping and cutting his sentences. I think, “too far,” is a matter of taste.
In his workshop, Lutz selected a handful of opening stories from well-regarded sources. He chose well known literary magazines. We looked at the language used in these sentences. Lutz became agitated. He wasn’t angry, but he seemed to summon the righteous wrath of a seventh grade composition teacher railing against the passive voice. The language of these writers, he pointed out, didn’t communicate any perception. Instead they delivered what we already knew. They asked nothing of the reader. They didn’t make any leaps, discoveries, or show the reader anything. He then presented a series of sentences from writers he admires: Dawn Raffel, Sam Lipsyte, and Amy Hempel.
He then walked us through the exercise of rebuilding a sentence. For example, a sentence might contain a number of expected words. For instance: The short boy leaned into the bat and managed to hit the ball. Bat, hit, ball, are expected words. A sentence can be a dwindling of a options. Each element in the sentence because of English’s dependence on word order gradually eliminates expectations. We are presented with a sentence that begins with a boy with a bat, we expect hit (or miss) and ball.
This was a concern shared by Gertrude Stein (
How to Write): “Successions of words are so agreeable.” and later the OULIPO. The OULIPO contended any literary form has one ideal expression. Original expression should be located in the creation of a form. A proof of the ideal is Raymond Queneau’s sonnet. For an idea of the form, check out Italo Calivino’s algorithm for
If On a Winter Night a Traveler, “How I Wrote One of My Books.” Most writers aren’t exactly good at math, so a popular way of creating a form is to mutilate an existing form with a constraint — say a detective novel where the letter “e” is omitted, Georges Perec’s The Void.
Most writers are taught through the peer-pressure of MFA programs of trying to publish their stories in committee-run literary magazines not to defy expectations. There are no rewards in private jokes and obscure methods. Do not write: The short boy leaned into the bat and managed to smack the old woman with the outer rim.
Lutz however asked us instead to consider the words and their order (their succession) and how we could change the vocabulary to make something new. He asked us to reshape the sentences and alter their shape as if they were made out of a plastic substance. He wanted us not only to rearrange the words like plastic blocks, but then to melt them with a butane lighter.
Many writers he pointed out will use a thesaurus. Instead he used a cross-word dictionary. He had a favorite one. He identified the dead-wood in in a sentence and began to rebuild it. Lutz begins to rework using phonic elements as opposed to trying to maintain the function of the sentence to communicate something else–plot, or story, or character.
This method echoes Richard Hugo’s:
This is probably the hardest thing about writing poems. It may be a problem with every poem, at least for a long time. Somehow you must switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the words.
Gary Lutz writes in “Spills,” a story fromI Looked Alive:
‘The youngest of the girls had proposed herself out of the least promising of bodies and had ever after let her life take its line from the coercive slants and downturns of her sisters’.” –
Matt Briggs«I very nearly can't read Gary Lutz, though I want to just about every day.
Every time I read Gary Lutz, the problem is, I can't stop the sentences I've read from sounding out, percussive and recurrent, days after in my head. I think a little like a Gary Lutz sentence. I write a little like a Gary Lutz sentence. Actually, that's not a bad fate: the tactics and strategies of a Lutz sentence are well worth dwelling within.
Life could better subsist as a Gary Lutz sentence, and on Wednesday night, in a talk at Columbia University called "The Sentence is a Lonely Place," Lutz let the standing-room only audience (people in the corridor, straining ears, themselves agape) in on how he reads and thinks a sentence by the letter.
Drawing on examples such as Christine Schutt's phrase "acutely felt, clearly flat," Lutz pointed out not just the obvious correspondences between the two monosyllables (and let's not forget one is a verb and one an adjective posing as a noun) but also the way that the first phrase "contains the alphabetic DNA" of the second. He tracked individual letters and combinations of letters through sentences and paragraphs from Diane Williams, Don DeLillo, Ben Marcus, Fiona Maazel, and Sam Lipsyte. Outlining his "poetics of the sentence" with a nod to Gordon Lish's ideas of "consecution" he talked about "the drama of the letters within the words."» -
allpurposemagicaltent.blogspot«Lutz’s stories make me think about the relation between experimental fiction and student composition papers. I had started on this line of thought earlier, in some work on Gertrude Stein. With both experimental prose and student exposition, the writing incessantly asks, “can this be a sentence? a paragraph? a story or essay?” The differences lie with the degree of consciousness the writer has of his or her effects, and with whether or not the reader is reading to learn or to teach. (Can a composition teacher reading student work learn and teach at the same time?)
I’m obviously out on a limb here, and in the interview Lutz explicitly dissociates his teaching and writing. Though his teaching does make at least one appearance in the stories. In his first book,
Stories in the Worst Way (scroll down), there is a story, “Slops,” about teaching composition. The title derives from the narrator-character’s chief physical characteristic, colitis. He itinerarizes his day, with the help of a pocket notebook, between “seventeen carefully chosen faculty restrooms.” But this is not a story about a teacher: it is about teaching. The following paragraph nicely blazons several of my deepest fears:
'Did I ever worry about the smell when I was passing out handouts in class? Because all I did was pass out handouts and read them out loud, then collect them and dismiss the class. None of it would be on the test. There were no tests—just papers. Not essays, themes, reviews, reports, compositions, critiques, research projects—but papers, sheets of paper, stapled together. I’d lightly pencil a grade n the upper right-hand corner, and that would be it—no comments or appraisals subjoined in authoritative swipes of a felt-tip pen. I made sure no telltale signs—spilled coffee, dogears, creases, crumples, crimps, fingerprint grime—would lead students to believe that their papers had ever been read. But I read them hard, expecting sentences to have been spitefully spatchcocked into the running gelatinization of barbarisms and typos to check up on me, to see if I was actually reading. For instance: “Dear ‘Professor’” You fucking stink. Try wiping yourself once and [sic] awhile [sic]. Or didn’t they teach that were [sic] you went to school? Bag it.” But I never found such interludings.'
(The “sics,” of course, are in the original.) Though this story is less for the squeamish than most of his others, all of Lutz’s characters are very much embodied. (I think there’s a Deleuze reference to be made somewhere here.) These stories are not about what people are, but what they do with their bodies.
There are no characters or plots in the normal sense because the characters in the stories lack identities and careers in the normal sense. They are too focused on incremental differences to maintain any narratives about their lives. Sex, for example, breaks down into the particular manipulations:
“I imagine I must have unbundled her, peeled off her underdressings, dipped my fingers into her, sopped and woggled them around, browsing, consulting what she had made of herself inside.” Office employees get too caught up in making photocopies look like photocopies (a process that takes hours) to keep their jobs.
“Slops” feels like an early work, being more direct in its grotesquery & more straightforward in presenting events. Most of Stories and all of his second book, I Looked Alive, has a more lapidary quality. As he reveals in the interview, as a writer and reader he is more interested in sentences than any other structure in writing. Often sentences in the stories feel as if they were written on their own, into a notebook, to find their way later into larger structures. When he says that he “comes close to forgetting” about his writing during the school year, I suspect that he manages to tuck away a sentence or phrase here or there during the semester. (Though a quick look at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg schedule for this term reveals him to be teaching four sections of comp: that could help you forget just about anything.)
Lutz also shows how experimental writing does not have to forego reference. He would like his sentences to have the “force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.” For all their waywardness and verbal tics, they have a strong affinity to that most conventional of storytellers, the inventor, along with his teacher, John Gardner, of the conventional, late-20th century short story, Raymond Carver. (Both Stories and I Looked are dedicated to Gordon Lish, Carver’s other teacher, as well as Lutz’s.) If most of them weren’t gay or bisexual (there are some finely oblique descriptions of bathroom cruising), the characters in the Lutz stories could just as easily be in Carver stories: between jobs and between significant others, on the margins of socially meaningful life in middle America. Does that sound like any adjunct composition instructors you know?» -
Lawrence LaRiviere White«
Michael Kimball: Let’s start with how you start one of your short stories. I’m pretty sure that it isn’t with plot, story, or even character. But is it, say, with an idea or a word, maybe a particular usage, or is it with a phrase, a feeling, or something else?- Gary Lutz: What often happens is that a word will force itself into my mind and lodge itself there for a week or longer, and I won’t be able to shake it out. It is usually a common word, nothing fancy or obscure, most likely just something I fixated on while idling my way through a newspaper, but it’s as if I had never before beheld its singular weirdness as typographical matter. I’ll probably write it down, and a day later it might be joined by another word, another specimen of humdrum, workaday English, and these two words will start to pal around in my head and maybe decide that they’re together for the long haul. Then I will set them out on a line on the screen of my computer, and I’ll insert other words between them and see how well they can handle being separated and how politely they treat the interlopers. A usable phrase, and sometimes even a sentence, might result from that sort of instigation and manipulation. I never start with an idea-I am not a person who has ideas about anything-and I almost never start with even a glimmer of a situation or a plot. (I think of plots as patches of ground that people get stuck on or stuck down into.) On those rare occasions when some sort of story-starting circumstance does throw itself at me, I sometimes decide to have a go at it, but the result is usually laden with dialogue or an excess of action, and I’ll eventually cut out the conversation completely and boil down most of the action and maybe retain a few snippets of description.
Does what develops, if it develops into a sentence, usually become the first sentence of piece then? I’m asking because there is this startlingly break that happens in the first sentences of your stories and often it seems as if it is because of a particular usage, say “warringly” in “In Kind” or before that two different phrasings where you put two words together that don’t often go together-”browless child” and “expressive swoop.” Were any of those the words that you started with in “In Kind”?The first paragraph to Gary Lutz’s “In Kind” is this: “To hear me tell it, I had been a browless child in shoes with an expressive swoop to the lacing, and I came out of college about the time the profs were just starting to get eerie about grades, and after graduation I walked out warringly into society for a while.”- Well, as far as I can recall, when the sentence in which “warringly” now appears was erupting, I was futzing around with the clause “I walked out into society for a while,” and I sensed that it needed a decisive adverb of some sort, something that would round out the sound of the clause, so I believe I took the “w” (already twice in attendance as an initial consonant) and threw it against the “or” in “for” and then saw I had “war,” which I then participialized into “warring,” an ugly, overfamiliar, nightly-news kind of word, and then I tacked on the adverbial “ly.” The result-I couldn’t find the thing in either of the unabridged dictionaries I haunt-seemed appropriate to the narrator’s self-important tone. The whole business seems to have been just an instance of applying the precept that you find your way to the word you want by letting the word extrude itself from pieces of words already present in your sentence.
The little method I described is one I resort to when putting together most of the sentences that eventually find their way into a story, but I can’t pretend to know what I’m doing. When I was writing the stories in my first book, I often worked on runs of consecutive sentences (maybe a couple of paragraphs’ worth) at a time, but when I was halfway through my second book, I started to fixate on stand-alone sentences that I only later pieced here and there into the arising paragraphs. I wanted to get away from the long, streamy sentences and paragraphs, and the unsegmented stories, that I had got into a rut of writing for the first few years after I finished my first book. So I started composing in a different way. These days, after I’ve got going on a story, I might be working on a dozen nonsequential sentences at a time over the course of a week. I’ll labor at one sentence until I get frustrated, and then I’ll move on to the next and toil away at that until I find myself getting nowhere. Sooner or later, I might trash half of two sentences and graft the surviving halves together, or I might take one phrase from each of three sentences, discard everything else, and fit the three phrases together into one new sentence. (This may account for those “breaks” you mentioned, but it’s often just a matter of my trying to make the sentences feel true to the jolts and didder of my nervous system.) At that stage, I will have no idea where any of these sentences will later belong in a story. In fact, each sentence will likely end up in a completely different segment. I proceed largely by hunches, by intuition. I try to heed any emerging rhythms or patterns of sound, and I do my best not to think.
This gives me an insight into your recent work that I did not have, that you construct sentences separately and that you then set those sentences against one another, or next to each other, to create paragraphs. There is a feeling in your more recent work, and especially in “In Kind,” a feeling I have reading it, that I was struck by: I think this approach gives your work greater scope. It’s as if you are putting great spans of time, periods of a character’s life, into one sentence. There is a grandness to it. But let me ask about a couple of other topics you mentioned. Since you’re not writing consecutive sentences, how do you decide that one particular sentence should come before or follow another sentence? And when you’re looking for emerging rhythms or patterns of sound, are there particular rhythms or particular patterns of sound that repeatedly feel right to you?- One of my troubles is that I do not have much time or energy to write, so when the opportunity presents itself, I always think of any story as an occasion to record, however half-assedly, the allness of how life-the sweep and the specificality of it-feels to me at that stage in my headway toward demise. So my stories now riot around in decades of a narrator’s life and do not so much advance as narrow themselves out unamelioratingly. When it comes to determining which sentence goes where, I often just feel my way forward. I’ll set a sentence down in a variety of paragraphic environs and see how ill at ease it seems to feel there. I don’t want my sentences leaning cozily against each other. I want frictions between them. I favor strifeful, spurtive paragraphs over ones that offer cushioning notions of continuity and causality. I like paragraphs that flutter the way time itself flutters. As a reader, I gravitate toward books that can be opened to any page and to almost any sentence and make some kind of instant, discomfiting sense of everything. I am drawn toward rhythms in which there are lots of stresses and hardnesses, and toward phrasings steeped in, or saturated with, a dominant vowel. I like inclemently declaratory sentences, sentences that disingratiate, sentences that feel full and final.
There are a lot of short paragraphs in “In Kind,” a lot of one-sentence paragraphs, and one of the great things about the story is how one paragraph follows another, how they build on each other and create these strange links and swerves. There are great leaps between paragraphs and often there is a great amount of implied action. There is so much that can be done with voice and different narrators, opening new ways to tell stories. OK, none of that is really a question, so let me try to ask one. Maybe you could talk a bit more about the frictions between the sentences, what these frictions are, or how you can sense how ill at ease a sentence is in a particular paragraph. I find this notion of friction especially interesting when you set it against the way that you use syntax and acoustics in and between sentences, which tends to smooth things out in another way. OK, I know there isn’t an actual question in there, but it’s implied, right?- I went through a phase of writing single paragraphs that massed themselves out over several pages, and it one day dawned on me that letting a paragraph assume such hulking proportions had become little more than a sneaky expedient allowing me to conceal underworked or unforgivably imperfect phrasing in a dense paginary surround. The much shorter paragraphs I have been writing of late seem uncloaked, exposed. Everything in them seems more available, visible, riskful. The neighboring sentences aren’t neighborly: they don’t mix with each other; they don’t honor the niceties of discursive narration. They provoke and protrude. The mistakes, the flubs, the ineptitudes of wording-they’re all right out in the open. (And, true, I do try to give a sequence of sentences a unifying, stabilizing pattern of sound or syntax; I believe that acoustical intrigue alone can hold a paragraph together.) Anyway, the longer paragraphs seemed not only counter to how my narrators apprehend experience, which is through unbidden glimmers and inklings (none of my narrators are blessed with a voice in the head that furnishes a running interpretation of human incident; they live outside psychology; the world comes through to them only in bursts, in blurts) but also counter to the rhythms of the narrators’ lives, lives that motion brokenly this way and that, lapsing a lot. And limiting myself to short paragraphs frees me to do away with much of the obligation to report or render the bustle and ruck of daily, weekly, monthly life: all the stage business, all the entrances and exits and wayside scenery, the pointless turnabouts between turning points. I am not a camera.
Maybe part of the explanation of why I write the way I write has to do with the way I sometimes read. I sometimes read a book from back to front, sentence by sentence-a practice that, as one might imagine, can give a completely different disposition to a book. (I was heartened, a few months ago, to discover in the journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson that a decade before he died, he realized that a “safer” way to read a Shakespeare play is “backwards;” otherwise, “the interest of the story is sadly in the way of poetry.”) And sometimes, when I chance upon something that has been edited with especial attentiveness, I read just for the grammar alone, or just for the punctuation, and find a rare and uplifting delight in the perfections.
I love what you just said about “all the stage business”-leaving all of that material out. I hate that story that opens with a character’s name, a physical description of the character, all of those words that don’t tell us anything that we need to know. Unfortunately, that describes far too many stories. I sometimes think that there must be a checklist posted somewhere and I’m glad that I don’t know where that is or what exactly is on that checklist. And I’m glad that you have found a different way to tell a story. I’m assuming that you must be close to having a third collection together. Is that right? What I’m wondering, though, is whether you have ever thought about writing a novel, whether you think that is possible with the method we have been discussing? I think it must be possible (I’m thinking of Beckett’s How It Is and also, say, David Markson’s late novels), though it might also be unbelievably difficult. But maybe you haven’t considered a novel because each of your stories is already a kind of tiny novel.- I’m maybe a third of the way into a third collection. I doubt that I could write a novel, unless I changed the way I write, and I doubt that I could change. For one thing, I lack the reach a novel would require. Anyway, I’m no fan of conversation or action. I’m big on upshots and bitter ends. As a reader, I now and then go through periods of wanting to see lots of description, and whenever I do, I turn first to John Updike, who I think is the most hauntingly precise describer this country has ever had. But mostly I like writing that’s capsular, conclusional-writing that gives you the precipitate of experience and not the experience itself. For me, the residue is usually more interesting than whichever person, place, or thing the residue might be residual of. My own characters are just remainders of people, I guess, and their “back story” (a term I never warmed to) doesn’t much concern me. I am concerned instead with the wonderless ways in which they’re finished. My stories are probably not even stories at all but just sobs in clausal form.
I know that we’ve already talked about this, but I want you to talk about it a little bit more-particular usages and phrasings. There are things you do in your stories, words and phrases that you use that set your stories apart from what so many other writers are writing. It is still English, impeccable English, but it does something strange to the reading experience. In “In Kind” there is “confusable buildings,” “thorough hair,” “upheavalist,” “unmonstrous,” and “morbid swither.” Even in this interview you have said “participialized,” “conclusional,” “paragraphic environs,” and “strifeful, spurtive paragraphs.” I would love to hear anything else that you are willing to say about this thing you do and I would like to coin a term for this. I’m thinking Lutziciple, no, Lutzafix, but I’m open to suggestions.- To me, language is matter-it’s a substance to be fingered and disturbed. All sorts of stuff can be pinned onto a word, or poked into it. I like to fasten an unaccustomed affix to the base of a perfectly drab noun or adjective. Oddballery of that kind appears to suit my narrators, who are forever in search of further, fussier ways to insist upon their difference. Yet I almost never resort to words that don’t officially exist; the ones you listed (”unmonstrous” is the lone exception) dwell snugly, if neglectedly, in my favorite unabridged dictionary of American English. (I would rather not invent words.) Another thing I like to do now and then is bring together two words that ordinarily would not want to have anything to do with each other. I like to see what happens.
OK, last question: Is there some aspect of your fiction that you work very hard at or that you find personally fascinating, but that most readers or reviewers don’t notice?- The traces of humor in most of my stories are, I guess, often overlooked.» - I
nterview with Michael Kimball«If you’re already familiar with the work of Gary Lutz, you can probably skip right ahead to the interview. If you’re not, a short sample passage will get all of us a lot more mileage than whatever descriptive gymnastics I’ve blown half the morning trying to solder into an accolade.
From time to time I show up in myself just long enough for people to know they are not in the room alone. Usually, these are people who expect something from me -- a near future, a not-too-distant future. What I tell them is limited to the people I have already had myself married against. Everything I say is to the best of my knowledge and next to nothing. It comes nowhere close.That’s the opening salvo of a story called “Devotions,” from his collection, Stories in the Worst Way. I picked that passage because I think that even if it doesn’t embody his whole range (as no single passage from any decent writer’s body of work should), it at least reflects the pointed screwiness of his insight and his fondness for alacritous swerves of phrasing.
I'm curious about Gordon Lish, who seems to be a figure of great controversy. I've met people who hate him with a truly rare vitriol, but I'm never quite sure why, and then of course there are those who love him. I know that you place yourself in this camp. What does he do that inspires such sharp differences of opinion and flares of emotion?- He was a magisterial presence in the classroom. At the core of his teaching was the necessity of achieving an intimacy between words that involves something more than simply a cohabitation based on obeying the laws of syntax and grammar and semantics and a kind of prose prosody. He was the most exacting teacher I have ever encountered, and also the most generous. Some of the students who enrolled in his classes were probably not prepared for the syllable-by-syllable scrutiny of their sentences that Gordon's teaching entailed. They might have been seeking little more than validation of their talent. But Gordon was never easily pleased. So some went away in bitterness and a few, I guess, in fury.
How did you first find out about him?- When I was nosing about in bookstores in the mid-eighties, I was eventually struck by certain slim books of prose fiction in which the sentences all but protruded from the page and poked out at me. There was Barry Hannah's Ray, for instance, and also his Captain Maximus, written in a kind of brawling, roughhouse aphoristicity, and there was the lovely neurotic one-liner-ish lyricism of Amy Hempel's Reasons to Live. The sentences in those books had a discernible topography, an unignorable spectacularity of contour and relief that was entirely unlike the depthlessness or bodilessness of the sentences I was seeing almost everywhere else. I eventually came to learn that all of the books I had been admiring had been edited by Gordon Lish. When I found out who he was, and where he was (ensconced at Knopf, in New York City, but venturing, come summertime, in a freelance professorial capacity to the Midwest and elsewhere), I jumped at the chance to study under him. I took his class for five straight summers in Bloomington, Indiana, and then once in Chicago.
...The summer before I went off to college, I bought an issue of Harper's magazine. I tried to read it, but too many of the words were unfamiliar to me. So I bought Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and read that instead. Words in isolation, not batched together to form thoughts, began to appeal to me. That is when I began develop a sense of the physicality, the materiality, the dimensionality, the inorganicity of words - words as things, as matter. The objecthood of words impressed itself upon me. But I felt like a latecomer to language.
I assume this feeling has abated since then. Your stories are linguistic marvels, almost word sculptures, but also case-studies in proper usage, a point frequently missed, or ignored, by your critics. I went and looked at the original Publishers Weekly assault on Stories in the Worst Way, and the most striking thing about it is not that they didn't like it, but that they called it unoriginal. That’s beyond a taste-call; it's simply incorrect.-
Stories in the Worst Way definitely took a beating, but if I had been assigned to review it, I probably would've panned it myself. It's not the kind of book that's asking for any wide welcome.
What then, if anything, is the book asking for?- Probably nothing. Maybe "ask" isn't the word. Maybe the book motions vaguely and uningratiatingly toward a certain kind of reader, someone who finds the world amply underintelligible but can't put much trust, or find much satisfaction, in the explanations and affirmations of the undepressed.
Reading that review, it felt to me like Stories got caught up in the knee-jerk anti-Pomo backlash that was going on, which is funny because I'm not sure that your work falls in line with the trends of that era.- I've never seen myself as part of any school or pack or coterie, or any trend, any movement or drift. I've never made an effort to understand postmodernism. I remember that in an interview somewhere, Barry Hannah remarked that postmodernism was too much like homework. What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores seem to lack language entirely.
I've read explanations you've given elsewhere about how the individual sentences are constructed, and I think your notion of characters "less as figures in case histories than as upcroppings of language, as syntactic commotions coming suddenly to a head" is an intriguing one, but there are recurring concerns in the writing that I'd like you to talk about. I'm thinking especially about gender and sexuality. It's interesting to me that you've never really been identified as a queer writer, since your characters tend to be bisexual, anti-monogamists. If they weren't so neurotic I'd be tempted to call them sexual revolutionaries.- It would pain me to be labelled a queer writer, because the classification would be missing the point. The people in my stories suffer attraction to other people, and each person is a novel, consuming totality of life and limb, eclipsing whoever it was that came before. To these people, differentiations of gender, of orientation, don't even register. They're just looking for somebody to ride out some sadness on, at least for a while.
But there's something inherently radical in that lack of discrimination, both in the characters who are riding out their sadnesses sans regard for differentiations, and in the writer who writes them that way. People love -- perhaps prefer -- to talk about the way you construct sentences, but I'm at least as interested in why you choose to tell these stories as I am in how you go about telling them. This non-registration of differentiations is a fundament of your work, it seems to me, and I'm curious if this is a personal/philosophical decision or an aesthetic one.- My characters seem to have involuntarily disimagined the differences between the sexes or between the standard categories of affection, but they cut me in on their hearts only so far before sinking back into the sentences and typography they spirited forward from. They rarely point to anything definite in my life or manage any likeness to people whose passages in life I might have been a party to.
I remember you mentioning in the Believer interview about consciously avoiding brand-names and other markers of culture and era. I think a writer's desire to be unfettered by the stuff of his day makes sense to me in an instinctual way, but I’d like to just hear your take on it.- I would hate to know exactly where and when my stories are set, in what suburbial latitudes those dark days keep coming. My characters seem bent on piecing themselves out of any big picture, and I have to honor their wish. I don't know which is finally sicker - specifics or engulfing abstractions.
I'm also curious about your abiding interest in the human arm.- As far as arms go, I think they're the one part of the body that tends to get short shrift in fiction, even though they're the place where the trouble between people usually gets it start.» -
Interview with Justin Taylor“
BLVR: When you manipulate words like this, is it a technical process? Are you using many reference materials? Or is it mostly intuitive?- I think that a lot of what I seem to be doing when I try to get from one end of a sentence to the other—a crossing that can take hours, days, weeks—is introducing words to each other that in ordinary circumstance would never meet . . . because I have some other hunch that they belong together, even though anyone else might write them off as entirely incompatible. I guess I work my way through a sentence by instigating these relationships—a perverse sort of matchmacking, apparently—and then to keep the words from getting too cozy, I might reach for an uncstomary preposition that plunges the sentence into some queasy depths. The whole undertaking seems to be alrgely intuitive and probably unnatural.[ . . . ]
Your acceptance of ambiguity seems more on the experimental side, while your interest in grammar seems more traditional. Would you ever call yourself a traditionalist?- I think it helps somehow if prose that on the surface might seem vivid in its disrupture or overthrowal of the conventional is ultimately discovered to be pure grammatical fussbudgetry underneath. (A friend tells me I’m a Victorian at heart.) I probably would not have had a long-enduring, even morbid fascination with prescriptive grammar and punctuation if I weren’t convinced that exactitude in such matters was a lost cause.
…A few years ago, trying to recover from a traumatic breakup, I made a study of hyphenation patterns in the New Yorker magazine back when William Shawn was in charge. I made the hyphen my lifeline, and I put my trust in William Shawn and his grammar genius, Eleanor Gould Packard… I eventually fell in love with somebody else and slept deeply for a while.
Two more, unhooked from the questions that prompted them:
As for fiction versus poetry, the border between the two seems less secure than ever. A lot of writing passes back and forth without anyone summoning the authorities. Some people have told me that what I write is poetry, that it could be laid out as such. But I am a sucker for the old notions of poetry and would never think of my paragraphic jitter in that light. Besides, regarding my stuff as prose is a much more cost-efficient use of paper. The reader gets a full page...
Another way of looking at this, maybe, is that the motions of even the most centrifugally active mind or heart have a circumference, and the writer of a story s hould probably respect or even celebrate the fixity of the circumference. But within those limits, anything should be welcome to clamor on behalf of itself or rise to an occasion or veer off into ultimately pertinent digression.” –
Interview with Brian Sholis"(1) Lutz’s language institutes the estrangement of modern life at a linguistic level. In doing so his prose has a curiously paradoxical quality. Oddly embodied and physical in their syntax and grammar Lutz’s sentences are also simultaneously removed and abstracted from their affect. Lutz’s style creates odd shifting channels, each sentence following its own set of gears and mechanisms. The emotional affect of the writing comes from the seepage of these forces acting upon one another. By the end of certain stories it even comes to oil them.
(2) Lutz is a very strange kind of realist-minimalist, the writing is so present, so gripping that the act of reading becomes oddly pressured, your mind gets worked into uncomfortable forms. I remember writing in an essay once that David Foster Wallace’s work was intellectually chiropractic, that it was rigorous and at times painful but that you always got the sense it wanted to make you better, leave you feeling refreshed and limbered up. Lutz’s writing has no such concerns. Lutz’s writing is crippling in affect, he demands our language honestly reflect something both abstract and real. This feels terrible but occasionally I’m reminded of Francis Bacon if one removed the overt ‘drama’ from the paintings, drained the colour and showed them only under the pale fluorescence of office light. His characters while always held at a stylistic distance are incredibly raw, appear always to have been pruned too far back. These disfigurements work because they are rooted in our received language, notions, expectations etc and it is once again a display of the paradoxical tensions at work in his writing. Lutz’s work, I think, serves a particular critique of a society warping under the pressure of its own compulsive mundanity. Often in his writing a cliché is obliquely referenced only for it to be turned on its head because its generic literalism, its acceptedness in the world, requires it to be hammer-locked, turned to honestly confront the audience it had forgotten.
(3)Lutz writing is so disorientating because it reverts the already reflected world back into position and what we see is nightmarish and recognizable.
(4) Lutz’s work belongs to that very special canon of realists that show us a legitimate and real version of hell, a hell all the more hellish and demeaning because we can and do tolerate it. The tax of it is so very stealthy after all. Traditional realist novels accept the representation of the world they are given and make critiques within it. Lutz is like Kafka but divested of his mythmaking narratives (we are not even allowed that now)." - Thomas Kendall
GARY LUTZ: THE SENTENCE IS A LONELY PLACEA LECTURE DELIVERED BY THE SHORT-STORY WRITER GARY LUTZ TO THE STUDENTS OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S WRITING PROGRAM IN NEW YORK ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2008http://www.believermag.com/issues/200901/?read=article_lutz
Jane Unrue, Life of a Star, Burning Deck, 2010.
Jane Unrue, Atlassed, Triple Press, 2005.
Jane Unrue, The House, Burning Deck, 2000.
