relatively new, at least.
gary lutz’s stories in the worst way was first published in 1996. i’ve been reading and rereading it since 2002 when it was brought back into print by 3rd bed. i was in syracuse for grad school in 2002, and i was assigned to teach the book for a course called living writers (probably the best course i’ve ever taught; one week we discussed a book as a class; the next, the book’s author came to read from and discuss the book with the class). i didn’t know what to expect when i got the book. i don’t know, but i think it was assigned because there was a strong 3rd bed/syracuse connection. anyway, everyone in the program was blown away, and the next semester he joined the faculty as a visiting writer and i was lucky to have him as my thesis advisor. my thesis was my first novel, the conviction and subsequent life of savior neck.
on gary lutz as thesis advisor:
unlike anything i’ve ever experienced. he didn’t treat it like a workshop, and he didn’t treat me like a mentee. instead, he was this weird and incredible combination of copyeditor and philologist.
he began by admitting to me that he was not really a “plot” person (this in itself was a positive sign — my novel was plot-heavy, but no one before him had seemed to notice it) but that he liked the way i used language. he then proceeded to go through the manuscript pointing out references that were so obscure, and in some cases so idiolectic (i had twisted a character’s name so that it punned on the title of an album by a scandinavian christian powermetal band from the early 90s — and gary got it!), that it was like he was reading my mind. there is one particular scene where the bulk of the dialogue was composed of beatles lyrics. gary said: “samuel beckett did things like that. but not with beatles lyrics.”
this is not all to suggest that gary and i are boys. we haven’t been in touch since i graduated, and, as generous as he was, i don’t think he was all that thrilled by my work. except for one brief part of it.
he really liked the prologue.
the thing about the prologue — it wasn’t as heavily stylized as the rest of the book and nowhere near as dense. it was about a boy who wakes up to the smell of his own death and worries he’ll never get the girl he likes.
not to toot my own horn, but everybody liked the prologue (conversely, almost everybody hated the rest). i understood why on an intuitive level, but i couldn’t get it on an intellectual level until i worked with gary. i realized he liked it because the style meshed with the content but also created an emotional effect that’s pretty near universal (again, not to toot my own horn — i’m going somewhere with this). in other words, without being anything like a gary lutz story, it attempted to do what i see gary lutz attempting to do in his work.
(this is not a qualitative evaluation.)
rocinante
on everything else i’ve been thinking about gary lutz and maybe you:
i mentioned beckett a minute ago.
i don’t recall ever seeing lutz compared to beckett and i think that’s really odd.
new stuff doesn’t come along very often in literature. beckett was new when he came along. his work was often taken as a direct reaction to joyce, who i don’t think was as new as beckett was, in the scheme of things. for example, they both were influenced by rabelais, but i think that that influence is more clear in joyce than in beckett. i’m not going to bother defending this. just take it as an axiom.
after beckett, there were a lot of people who were compared to beckett. bernhard, for example, who was awesome, but not as similar to beckett as people wanted to believe. barthelme himself (awesome, too) thought he was in the line of beckett but he was wrong. i also remember this blurb for infinite jest that compared wallace to beckett, which was fucking absurd (don’t worry, sven, i still like your essays). and please do not talk to me about maurice blanchot (who is good for some things, anyway).
have you ever read wolfgang borchert? he was actually coeval to beckett, i think.
now think about beckett’s second trilogy, which was awful, and how he tried to abstract his characters completely.
i think stories in the worst way (as well as much of i looked alive and all of partial list of people to bleach) succeeds where beckett failed in the end. this is not to say that that was lutz’s intent, but that it was a result.
when you read lutz, despite and also because of the incredible syntactical contortions, you don’t necessarily know where the characters really live, what the characters really do, or even whether they’re male or female, and yet you feel them on a primal level. form, content, and also something beyond craft, which you as an artist do not have direct access to, combine to create this effect in surround sound.
it is an entirely new (as of 1996) thing.
unfortunately, there’s nothing i can do to prove it. to emphasize that, i’m not going to include any examples of gary lutz’s writing (which is against my religion. now i’m a heretic). you can find some of his work here.
why, then, am i bothering to post this?
i’ve been thinking about lutz a lot lately. i haven’t been reading him a lot lately (i haven’t read his fiction in a few months), just thinking about his work. the reason i’ve been thinking about it is because i’ve been reading a lot of gary lutz imitators.
and they are fucking terrible.
writers, you can not write “gary lutz sentences.” more importantly, you can not take “gary lutz sentences” and apply them to your own hobby horses. “gary lutz sentences” only work in the context of gary lutz’s takes on the world, whatever they are and wherever they go. it isn’t like when you or your big brothers were inserting footnotes into their short stories or making up wacky theme parks, and i never wrote anything truer.