Gary Lutz, writer extraordinaire.
My first exposure to American author Gary Lutz: reading his A Sentence is a Lonely Place,
an incisive essay on language and our facility as writers to create
memorable sentences that are themselves works of art. Delectable direct
quotes:
"As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and
as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted
to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in
which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy
of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated
from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as
a totality, an omnitude, unto itself."
"The sentence is a
situation of words in the most literal sense: words must be situated in
relation to others to produce an enduring effect on a reader."
"These
writers (of artful sentences) recognize that there needs to be an
intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with
grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds,
the forms and contours, of the gathered words."
"A pausing,
enraptured reader should be able to look deeply into the sentence and
discern among the words all of the traits and characteristics they
share."
"Pretty soon in the writer’s eyes the words in the
sentence are all vibrating and destabilizing themselves: no longer solid
and immutable, they start to flutter this way and that in playful
receptivity, taking into themselves parts of neighboring words, or
shedding parts of themselves into the gutter of the page or screen; and
in this process of intimate mutation and transformation, the words swap
alphabetary vitals and viscera, tiny bits and dabs of their languagey
inner and outer natures; the words intermingle and blend and smear and
recompose themselves."
I then watched a video where Gary Lutz
spoke with students at a college. Gary alluded to his habit of reading
with careful attention to punctuation, most especially the placement of
commas, and his frequently reading a piece of fiction starting with the
last sentence and progressing backwards - this to focus on the formation
of the individual sentences themselves rather than story.
And
when asked if he listens to music when he writes, Gary said 'no';
rather, he puts in earplugs and wears headphones playing white noise -
this to completely seal out any external noise and sound.
I
mention all of the above for a specific reason: to stress when it comes
to Gary Lutz, we're talking highly distinctive, idiosyncratic and quirky
(in a good sense) and it's well to keep Gary's approach to writing in
mind when we read his short stories.
Turning to Pulls, a
seven-pager narrated in the first person by an unnamed middle-aged guy
who might share a number of personality ticks with Gary, we're
immediately given this bit of info:
"This wife and I had a
rented house, two stories of brutal roomth. The air conditioner required
a bucket underneath it. Our meals were the cheapest of meats thinly
veiled."
So much revealed is so few, simple words. Of course, the
most distinctive word here is 'roomth' coming from the Middle English
and denoting a confined space, giving even more emphasis to 'brutal' and
letting us know the digs he shared with 'this wife' proved REALLY
brutal, as in suffocating, as in an emotional death trap, as in no
escape unless you fled. And the two following sentences leave little
doubt he and wife were scratching the bottom of society's underbelly,
reduced to listening to a constant drip, drip, drip and eating crap food
requiring ketchup or sauce to make it eatable, at least.
The
narrator tried to steer wife to other women. He treated her and a sex
starved candidate to a meal and let them go off with a gesture of good
wishes. But following her fling, wife returned less than radiant. "She
came home ebbing in all essences, looking explored and decreased."
You
gotta love that "ebbing in all essences." Not only for the meaning of
those 'e' words, ebbing denoting a decline, a decay, a fading away and
essences as in the essential, enduring core of a person, but their
perfect placement in the sentence carrying forth to repeat 'e' twice
over: explored (oh, violated wife!) and the long 'e' in decreased that
gives the ending of the sentence the power of a knockout punch.
Did
the narrator swing the other way on his own fling? Yes, indeedy-do -
with a boyfriend who happened to be his best friend back then. His
wife was less than thrilled. The narrator goes on to share the tone for both
the state of wife and his relationship with wife at the time:
"Thirty-eight
years of picked-over, furying age she was - brittled hair, a bulwark
forehead, a voice that sounded blown through. There were hidey-holes in
whatever she said.
I felt indefinite inside of her, out of my element and unstately in my need."
In
addition to his use of assonance and alliteration, Gary Lutz's breezy
humor here reminds me of the master of breezy humor, minimalist Peter
Cherches, when Peter writes in his Dirty Windows: "Early on in their relationship they agreed to proceed cautiously, so they hired extras to do the stunts."
Pulls
contains much understated sadness. "I lived in the lonelihood of my
portents and pulls." But then the unexpected: the tale's concluding
short sentence. A life changer.
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Pulls can be read in Gary's short story collection, Partial List of People to Bleach, or the more recent The Complete Gary Lutz published by Tyrant Books.
American author Gary Lutz, born 1955
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