Partial List of People to Bleach by Gary Lutz

 


In the spirit of an opening act to warm up the crowd, before I write anything about Gary Lutz, take a look at several mini-chapters from Heartscald, one of eleven short stories included in Partial List of People to Bleach:

ERRAND
The girl behind the counter rang up my package of paper towels and said, "Will that be all?"
"No," I said, "I want to suck out all of your memories."

THE TROUBLE BETWEEN PEOPLE USUALLY GETS ITS STARTED
The pastor kept saying, "Thy will be done," and all I could think was, "Thy what will be done?"

SHE WAS CARDIACALLY ALL OVER THE PLACE
What they told me is that when the doctors opened him up, they found lots of accordion files, jars full of wheat pennies, a glockenspiel, a couple of storm windows, and told him there was nothing they could do.

RECORD PLAYER
I used to play my records with the volume turned all the way down.
I would lower my ear to the needle to hear the tiniest, trebliest versions of the song.

GIRL
She wanted me to believe her best feature was her shadow.

FATHERLAND
The state I was born in had to be abbreviated as "PA."

THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANTED TO SAY BUT SO WHAT?
I wish I could inhabit my life instead of just trespassing on it.
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Pretty cool, eh? Gary has it all going here: he's astute, witty, savvy, quirky, playful and possesses an incredible ear for the nuances of language.

Gary recognizes his writing will not appeal to a wide audience since his literary aesthetic will frustrate the expectations of what many people expect in a short story, such things as character development, characters with names, a designated setting, say New York or Pittsburgh or Greensburg (Gary's current city) ; rather, his writing is language oriented, sentence oriented, writing that will attract a reader who is, as he expresses it, a "page hugger" rather than a "page turner."

Nope, none of that hastily turning pages to find out what happens next when reading Gary; quite the opposite: a reader will be invited to hug the page, to linger, to luxuriate, to relish each well-formed sentence, its stressed syllables, the precise placement of each word, possible instances of assonance and alliteration, the sound the words make together.

For, as Brian Evenson states so eloquently: "The drama of Lutz’s work is in the language—in the sentence as a unit in particular. He crafts each part of his sentence carefully enough that there are subdramas in the relationships of the words themselves, in the productive tensions between them. If you are looking for story and plot, you have come to the wrong place. If your idea of character involves epiphany and obvious change, then look elsewhere. But if you are interested in seeing what language can really do when deftly manipulated to give it great flexibility, in seeing how the subtleties of struggling minds might be expressed, and in learning a new way of reading, welcome."

We encounter one such struggling mind in Loo where the narrator (I picture an older brother sharing Gary's gift for language) describes, in terms both tender and tined, his sister Loo's slow fade into a foglike gray beginning with her ordinariness in childhood: "She was done up in a body bereft of freckles or shine."

Here's another pithy line re Loo's blandness as a young lady: "Her private life was not so much private as simply unwitnessed." And a little further on: "She had the disadvantage of looking like a lot of other people."

Let's pause here and take a closer look at that last Lutz sentence. Notice the alliteration of those three 'l' words in the phrase "looking like a lot." And there's not only the sound but the simple shape (one vertical stroke) of each "l," almost as if the shaftlike line of the unornamented consonant is a stand-in for the plainness of sister Loo, almost as if Gary is writing the prose counterpart of concrete poetry with its preoccupation with the symbolic significant of letters and the pattern letters make on the page. No wonder seasoned translators agree Gary Lutz is the only writer in English who is absolutely untranslatable!

Then, toward the story's conclusion, we read: "There was the ruck and malarkey of a diary for a while. She dressed page after page in a sneaky, tossing backhand." Not only do we have all the many points of language, including the shape and sounds of those words grouped together, but also so much revealed respecting Loo's mindset: the "ruck and malarkey" of a diary, as if Loo could take the edge off her ordinariness, as if she could fool the reader by committing the thoughts and events in her uneventful, unremarkable life to paper in a handwriting dressed up in flourishes.

Loo is about one hundred sentences sectioned off into seventeen separate short episodes covering little more than four pages. The attention given the above four sentences could easily expand out to each one of the hundred - Gary Lutz's language packs that much wallop. Remarkable. Make that remarkable times ten.

Lastly, I'll turn to my favorite mini-chapter in a four pager entitled Six Stories:

CONCENTRATION
The narrator alludes to something wrong with the son - the kid needs special shoes along with other special education requirements. But then life gives the kid a break. How does Gary Lutz express this breakthrough? Below we have the entire glorious paragraph. Among my favorite words: encumbering, portable, fenestration, tidily, destitute, thick, wicket, cage, fittingly - and my favorite bit: the kid feeling he's in a wicker basket cage but a wicker where he's equipped to better maneuver through his schooldays.

"His one big break was getting told he needed eyeglasses - an encumbering portable fenestration that made props of his nose and ears. It was not so much that the world was now filled in more tidily (things were less destitute of outline, less likely to drown within themselves before they arrived in the thick of his eye) as that he felt he had acquired a wicker about himself, a little cage up front through which business could get quickly and fittingly done."
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*Note: All eleven stories in Partial List of People to Bleach are also included in The Complete Gary Luz published by Tyrant Books


American author Gary Lutz, born 1955

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