A Portable Solitude

By Gavin Thomson

For a master of the short story, Garielle Lutz (who has previously published as Gary Lutz) isn’t much of a storyteller. It’s unclear what happens in the fourteen stories that make up her latest collection, Worsted. They’re impossible to synopsize. The settings are shadowy, the narrators passive, the characters indistinguishable. Lutz writes to reward page-hugging rather than page-turning readers. The contour of a sentence matters more to her than the contour of a plot. She is an unabashedly heavy-handed stylist whose untranslated, untranslatable prose draws attention to its sound and surface. She has been called a writer’s writer, as well as a writer’s writer’s writer. Among those who praise her work are Ottessa Moshfegh, Amy Hempel, Ben Marcus, and George Saunders. Her loyal readers form a sort of cult.

Her stories are impressionistic and moody, and Worsted belongs to the same universe of moods, mostly grey, as do her previous collections, starting with Stories in the Worst Way (1996). Once again Lutz is concerned with the dispiriting everyday realities of aging, divorce, mediocrity, loneliness, and alienation from oneself. “I’m barely a broth of whoever I was even an hour ago,” says the narrator of “Ernie Bushmiller Already a Decade Dead.” Lutz grew up working-class in Allentown, Pennsylvania and she has lived for many years outside Pittsburgh, where until recently she taught English composition and business writing at The University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. The characters in Worsted are stuck in unnamed little dismal cities where they work middling office jobs or teach at community colleges. Reading the stories, you can almost hear the photocopiers. You can almost smell the rotting corpse of ambition. Maybe growing up just means getting old, and getting old just means giving up.

What Lutz’s characters want is unclear, either because they don’t know what they want or because they’re tired of wanting. The objects of their desire, when they do desire, are interchangeable. They go from person to person, whatever gender, as though from gas station to gas station, on the road to nowhere notable. They’re at once disembodied and too embodied—intruders in the bodies that imprison them. Having a body is such a comical predicament, and the joke is always on them. “Why must a body keep being a burlesque of the person within?” (“Ernie Bushmiller Already a Decade Dead”). Body parts are mashed together without a master plan. “Her breasts looked packed onto her” (“A Low-Hanging Towel”). Shit, shame, more shit! “The girl ate out of paper bags and relieved herself in wastebaskets” (“I’m Not Family”). Maybe life without a body would be better? “The human body—must there even be such a place?” (“Ernie Bushmiller Already a Decade Dead”). Then there is all the sex.

Sex scenes risk being inadvertently funny. The worst soil careers. (In 1993, the Literary Review established the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award. John Updike ended up winning the Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award.) The safest option for writers is to avoid sex entirely. Plenty today practice celibacy on the page. Lutz, a black sheep in this and many other regards, writes such passages as:

He went into me every night as far as he could go. Everything within had to get packed tighter and tighter together to make room for what he had to do. I tried to picture the bloodied lining of my life inside, the stringy stickiness of it. I worried about what might fall out. I worried about how I would ever get all of it wadded back in. How would I even know where things were supposed to go?

If this is what sex for them is like, I can’t help but wonder why Lutz’s characters want to have sex in the first place. Then I remember that desire and pleasure are complicated; also, that the way words touch each other is more important to Lutz than the way genitals do.

The sentence is the nucleus of Lutz’s poetics. According to a talk she gave at Columbia and later published as an essay called “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” which no review of her work can go without mentioning—perhaps because only she can explain what she does—a sentence, or rather a good sentence, is “a portable solitude.” Her aim is to write “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.” (Lutz has been called a maximalist. She has also been called a minimalist.) She favors difficulty over mush-brained entertainment, the startling neologism over the predictable word, fresh basil from the market over its dehydrated counterpart from above the stove. “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” which runs much longer than most of her stories—she has never published a novel—is, among other things, an aesthetic manifesto and a manual on craft. In it, Lutz elucidates her literary ideals and practice. She says words are not unlike people who need to get along. “The aim of the literary artist,” she says, “is to initiate the process by which the words in a sentence no longer remain strangers to each other but begin to acknowledge one another’s existence and do more than tolerate each other’s presence in the phrasing. The words have to lean on each other, rub elbows, rub off on each other, feel each other up.” The sentence isn’t actually a lonely place.

On the contrary it’s chummy, familial. Lutz praises her favorite living writers—who like her are disciples of Gordon Lish—for recognizing that, in prose, 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.” This doesn’t mean Lutz doesn’t have a hawkish eye for grammar. In a review of the 14^th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, she says the new chapter added by editor Bryan A. Garner, author of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, could use more editing. What Lutz is saying is that grammar is the spinal cord that enables words to stand up and mingle.

Liberating words from their humdrum routines, using nouns as verbs, entrepreneuring neologisms, stretching syntax into postures so freakish they cause phantom pains—these are some of the intrepid techniques by which Lutz achieves the “intra-sentence intimacy,” as she puts it, which she values. The impression she would like her writing to give is that “the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened and grown and matured in each other’s company—and that they cannot live without each other.” Consider this sentence from the title story of Worsted:

He marveled at some bananas, played marbles with some grapes.

These words share a family resemblance. The first of the two phrases is eight syllables long; the second is six. There is at least one “a” in six of the ten words comprising the sentence; there are eight “a”s in total—a genetic trait, like red hair, which all phrases share. There are three sets of twins: two “ed”s, two “es”s, and two “some”s. The words “marveled” and “marbles” look alike enough to be brothers. The sentence is a family portrait. In the middle of the frame, surrounded by its loved ones, is “banana.” Banana might as well be nana.

In her essay, “The Poetry of the Paragraph: Some Notes,” Lutz reveals her secrets—how she goes about writing such sentences. Credit goes to Lish, under whom she once studied for as many days as there are letters in the alphabet. Thanks to Lish she learned that when a writer “is searching for a word to fill a vacant slot in a sentence, the writer can look to the other prominent words in the sentence, examine their sonic disposition, and borrow something of their sound: this can lead the writer to a word that might not otherwise occur to him or her.” Lutz has admitted to spending weeks on a single sentence. That is how she works.

What such work involves is a matter of conjecture. Let’s say that, when she was working on the sentence about bananas and grapes, the word that she unexpectedly arrived at by looking to the other prominent words in the sentence was “marbles.” Without “marbles,” the sentence would still make sense: “He marveled at some bananas, played with some grapes.” But it would lack musicality and symmetry. Let’s say that, before settling on “marbles” to fill the vacant spot between “played” and “with,” Lutz looked to and examined the sonic disposition of the four prominent words she’d already come up with: “marvelled,” “bananas,” “played,” and “grapes.” Let’s say she noticed a pattern of sounds and letters in these four words and, in searching for the vacant slot, rearranged this pattern into the word “marbles.” Each of the four prominent words in the sentence contains three or more of the letters in “marbles.” The word “marvelled” contains in the following order “mar” and “le.” “Bananas” contains “b,” “a,” and “s.” “Played” contains “l,” “a,” and “e,” and “grapes” contains “r,” “a,” and “es.”

Let’s further say that Lutz also noticed, after she had filled the vacant slot in the sentence with “marbles” but before she decided the sentence was good to go, that its final word, “grapes,” satisfactorily rounds off the sounds and surface of the sentence. “Grapes” achieves this in four ways:

1. by half-rhyming with the word that initiates the second of its two parallel clauses, “played”;
2. by combining four letters that have already appeared in the sentence, “rapes”;
3. by adding a new consonant—“g”—that visually rounds off the “p”s that precede and succeed it;
4. and by concluding the second claus, like the first, with a fruit.

And let’s say yet another thing Lutz noticed when working on the sentence was that it rolls forward and back again. Forward because “marvelled” rolls into “marble,” which then rolls, like a marble, into “grapes”; and backward because “grapes,” another thing that rolls, calls back to both “marbles” and “bananas,” and “marbles” echoes “marvels.” The sentence gratifies the senses.

Lutz’s severe poetics and unexampled writing style, combined with her distaste for plot and her preference for especially short short stories, are reasons why she has been called a writer’s writer’s writer. But a writer’s writer’s writer isn’t always a reader’s writer, or a critic’s writer. Lay readers who have posted reviews of Lutz’s fiction on websites like Amazon have called her fiction “onanistic” and “pretentious.” Reviews tend to range from warm to raving, but at least a couple describe Lutz’s work in no less gentlemanly terms.

Like her fellow alliterator Nabokov, to whom she’s often compared, Lutz understands language as painterly and musical. But her understanding sometimes leads her into trouble. Some sentences in Worsted try too hard and don’t make sense. From “I’m Not Family”: “Whenever talk turned to marriage, as it often did, you had to wonder which end of an overreaching penis might be the one that could point toward anything worth keeping.” Doesn’t a penis have only one end? Reading Lutz requires abnormal amounts of attention, so it’s frustrating when that attention goes unrewarded.

Yet in Worsted there are also a few sentences, even paragraphs, which are so uncharacteristically plain they’re eerie. The title story, which at 55 pages is the longest in the collection and at least seven times longer than a typical story by Lutz, begins, “I remember the first wedding I ever went to. The priest sat down next to me at the reception. This was at some fire hall.” What’s going on here? These sentences aren’t recognizably Lutzian. They seem not only to take an unexpected detour from the lonely path she has travelled since her first book, but they also seem to betray her aesthetic principals. Elsewhere in the title story, Lutz will start a sentence with a cliché—a cliché!—then, as if to assure us she’s only joking, swerve back into Lutz-speak. “In my mind’s eye,” says the narrator, “she is still a shatterling of unpardonably fugitive beauty stuck in a life not yet marred to the hilt.”

The more inimitable a stylist, the more likely she will seem, in her later work, to be imitating herself. In “Worsted,” Lutz stretches self-imitation into self-parody. The sometimes straightforward (and droll) narrator, a writer, recalls a gig he once had at a music magazine where his job was to “aggrandize press releases into vividly worded personality features” that adhered to house style. When he wrote his first assignment, the publisher read one paragraph and said, “Who could’ve put you up to this?” That afternoon, the writer restyled the rest of his piece, “tonging out proper nouns, shoving in the requisite cleveresque epithets.” The following day he further sabotaged himself:

a new dispensation: mandatory alliteration. From thesauruses, crossword-puzzle dictionaries, and penciled word lists that fresco the wall above my work station, I clap together “the freckly, flame-haired fantastico,” “the vampish, velvet-voiced voluptuary,” et ceterally, then farce the phrasing into the ever-narrowing columns of type the publisher now favored.

The writer gets fired for breach of policy. A literary career is difficult for someone so in love with language. Difficult—and highly dignified.

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Gavin Thomson completed his MFA (Fiction) at Columbia, where he was a Felipe P. De Alba Fellow. He’s at work on his first novel.