The New York Review of Books - 26.03.2020

16 The New York Review

Private Parts of Speech

Merve Emre

The Complete Gary Lutz
by Gary Lutz.
Tyrant, 499 pp., $19.95 (paper)

Over the last year, little by little, I have
grown suspicious of the erotics of art.
It’s not just that I object to the oppo-
sition, famously asserted by Susan
Sontag, between interpretation and
sensuality. It’s that any overeager com-
mitment to producing or consuming art
as an erotic experience often results in
some very inexpert writing about both
aesthetics and sex—rhapsodic, humor-
less, self-aggrandizing prose that gets
off on the most basic category errors.
When asked by an interviewer what the
most interesting thing was that she had
learned from a book recently, the ac-
tress and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge
replied, “That orgasms can be brought
on by art, and vice versa.” I found this
idea distressing. Practical consider-
ations aside, what kind of sick person
wants her orgasms to come from art? A
person more concerned with receiving
pleasure than giving it is one answer;
a person who prefers her pleasure de-
personalized, disembodied, and safely
contained by representation is another.
Art, after all, doesn’t demand reciproc-
ity or reality.
Reading the aggrieved, heart-
dragging short stories of Gary Lutz
complicates these doubts. Grungy-
haired and lantern-jawed, unnerved
by sustained eye contact, and self-
conscious of his middle age, Lutz is not
ashamed to admit in interviews that he
suffers from “ED”: “Experience Defi-
cit.” He presents himself as a man who
has lived a singularly unremarkable
life of dejection, a man to whom noth-
ing exciting has happened and who is
incapable of exciting himself or anyone
else—except through writing. Writing,
he tells us, is where one word can draw
other words toward it, tentatively at
first, then with a violent resolve. Writ-
ing is where one sentence can “over-
come its aloofness or diffidence and
begin to make overtures to another
sentence,” each rubbing the other
the right or wrong way—more often
wrong than right—before settling into
a jittery, strained alliance. Writing is
where withdrawing paragraphs can
gaze upon each other with agony and
longing, for they know that the end of
one paragraph and the beginning of the
next announces a traumatic rupture,
“an irreversible parting of ways.” “Yes,
I think there might be some fetishizing
of language going on,” Lutz admits.
“Shouldn’t writing be far more sexual
than sex?”

The answer, the ninety-one stories in
The Complete Gary Lutz insist, is yes;
ninety-one times, yes, though it’s not
long before one starts to crave an oc-
casional and ruthless no. Nearly all of
Lutz’s stories voice the ordinary miser-
ies of marriage, infidelity, and divorce.
Often, his stories are told in the first
person, though “telling” is too delib-
erate and too dramatic an activity to
convey his narrators’ passivity, their
anonymity, their conviction that the in-
dividual is little more than a husk for
the existential condition of alienation.
Lutz likes his “I” unnameable. As

the narrator of “Certain Riddances”

snarls:

Give a person a name and he’ll sink

right into it, right into the hollows

and the dips of the letters that spell

out the whole insultingly reduc-

tive contraption, so that you have

to pull him up and dance him out

of it, take his attendance, and fuck

some life into him if you expect to

get any work out of him.

His speakers are vague and voyeuristic,

incapable of fixing their coordinates in

space and time. Lacking the volition

and stability to be novelists, they work

on the outskirts of literary culture as

technical writers and temps, invisible,

interchangeable, beleaguered by the

alien encrustations and protuberances

t hat ot her s refer to a s “ t he body.” W hen

they have sex, which they frequently

do, in threes and twos, it seems to take

place on some metaphysical plane be-

yond the human. “I was...organizing

myself within the dark of the body she

was sticking up for herself inside,” ob-

serves the narrator of “Claims.” They

drift in and out of peoples’ lives like

lackadaisical ghosts, showing up only

long enough, as Lutz might say, for

their lovers to remember they’re not in

the room alone.

Language seems to slough off on

Lutz’s narrators, and they collect that

language like the underside of a finger-

nail collects the skin and blood from an

episode of brief, violent scratching—in

sentences so attentively worked over,

so operatically constructed, that the

words themselves yearn to hold the

excess energy of their erotic despair;

to convert it into a charge, a current

that shocks the reader. Lutz is known

for his sentences, and for good reason.

They are extravagant, weird, and in-

tensely diagrammatic, the kind of sen-

tences that would have made Gertrude

Stein cry. He champions the sentence

as the unit of sexual and emotional po-

tency, a “vivid extremity of language,

an abruption, a definitive inquietude.”

It is “the place where writing comes to a

point and attains its ultimacy”—Lutz’s

invented word for a supreme and unat-

tainable closeness of thought, of mood,

between reader and writer.

Consider, in his first collection, Sto-

ries in the Worst Way (1996), a sentence

from “Contractions”: “Men wanted my

toes in their mouths or my torso roped

against a chair or my mouth lipsticked

and wordless or my brain ligatured to

whatever unknottable neural twist that

in their own brains winched their raw-

ing, blunted dicks into place.” It starts

simply enough, with the acknowl-

edgment of a common fetish (“Men

wanted my toes in their mouths”), then

builds momentum by raising the pos-

sibility of other common fetishes (“or

my torso roped against a chair or my

mouth lipsticked and wordless”), other

ordinary permutations of wanting and

having, possessing and objectifying.

Imminently excitable, breathing down

the neck of its next and final “or,” the

sentence awaits its climactic fetish. But

something seems to go wrong: “or my

brain ligatured to whatever unknotta-

ble neural twist that in their own brains

winched their rawing, blunted dicks into

place.” The language has turned ab-

stract, confusing, the meaning unclear.

One must pause and reread for clarity.

The men want what? And where? And

how, exactly, is the narrator to go about

giving them what they want?

What throws the reader is not just

the crowding of words describing in-

tractable or mechanical acts of twining:

“l igatu red,” “u n knottable,” “tw ist,”

“winched”—the last one sets my teeth

grinding. It’s not the startlingly crude

description of men’s penises as “raw-

ing, blunted dicks.” It’s the unexpected

appearance of brains; the suggestion

that the hot secret of sex is buried in fis-

sures and folds we can neither see nor

touch; the banishment of desire from

its exterior and anatomical structures

to an organ whose innermost workings

we barely understand; the invitation to

conceive that desire as more immate-

rial than material, more phenomenal

than physical. This, the sentence im-

plies, is the height of sexual perversity,

the most outrageous fetish of all: the

idea that one mind can reach out and

touch another with more precision and

directness than one person’s mouth can

suction up another person’s toes. Mind-

fucking is the necessary stimulus for the

dicks to stand to order, to fall in line. It’s

a lot of pressure—too much, maybe—

to place on the erotic. Hence the ED.

Maybe it is unfair of me to wrench

sentences like these from the stories

that house them, to expose and dissect,

to indulge my muddled feelings of skepti-

cism and attraction. But in Lutz’s stories,

the middle ground of narrative, where

one might expect to encounter a plot or

an interestingly developed character or

two, remains largely unoccupied, bar-

ren for commentary. And anyway, his

vocabulary is so big and bendy, his tal-

ents so conspicuously on display, that

I can’t help myself. Take two more ex-

amples, the first from Partial List of

People to Bleach (2007), about a man’s

reunion with the body of his “sweetly

unpoised, impersonal” ex-wife:

She unbuttoned, unzipped. I had

forgotten, I suppose, the finely hir-

sute earthliness of her, that vicious

uneternal splendency. (The skel-

ter of moles along the small of her

back, the salmon-patch birthmark

on the nape of her neck, the bubbly

something near the groin—that

droll, brazen sincerity of her body

had always been a sticking point.)

The second from Assisted Living

(2017), a description of a “third party”

dragged into “an open marriage that

leaked from both ends”:

The moods amassing in her eyes

(greenish eyes adrowse, though ev-

idently truthful), relevant moles on

the left arm, hair begloomed and

aptly directed sideward (then later

mostly hatcheted away), knees ar-

ranged buxomly, accentual acne on

expanses of her back, all of these

parts carnalized only in retrospect:

she was a brightly miserable and

unperspirant physical therapist out

of keeping with herself.

Once the initial shock of reading

Lutz had subsided, I started to remem-

ber that not all sex is good sex. Unlike

the sublime stories of his contemporary

Diane Williams, whose writing seizes

and intensifies the experience of mind-

bending fucking, of how yearning and

surrender can converge to suspend

time and prick the senses, Lutz’s stories

bog down in their desperate attempts

to please, their sweating, strenuous ver-

bal gymnastics, their reluctance to let

moments of rapture vibrate or expand,

so anxiously does the next sentence in-

trude with its “‘fuck off’ lunge,” as Lutz

describes his refusal to cushion the

reader with “pillowy transitions.” His

stories are exhausting. I find it impossi-

ble to read more than two in a single sit-

ting. My mind cramps with strain more

often than it tingles with pleasure. Fre-

quent water and bathroom breaks are

needed. The imagined presence of the

Philip Guston: Legend, 1977

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston