18 The New York Review
reader is, if not irrelevant to his perfor-
mance of virtuosity, then certainly an
afterthought. (His stories are “nearly
too good to read,” writes Ben Marcus,
in what strikes me as a very diplomatic
back-handed compliment.) The effect
isn’t onanistic; one doesn’t get the sense
that Lutz is getting off on his sentences
any more than you are. Rather, there’s
a shared feeling of blundering misery.
Everyone is working too hard, no one is
having as much fun as they think they
should be having, and someone—prob-
ably one of Lutz’s narrators—is going
to end up soft and shriveled and sob-
bing in the bath.
The refusal of transcendence is the
point of Lutz’s backbreakingly cul-
tivated mannerism, his association
with that most wretched and alien-
ated of contemporary literary figures,
“a writer’s writer,” or worse yet, “our
own little Beckett” (as one reviewer put
it). The mannerism is also, obviously, a
form of self-disclosure, the only form
available to a man who prides himself
on his self-effacement. The sexual dra-
mas that Lutz orchestrates between
words and sentences, the compulsive-
ness with which he flouts lexical fidel-
ity and syntactical propriety—these
are strategies for speaking one’s pain
through the excessive and idiosyncratic
markings of style. He can avoid re-
course to scantily clad autobiography.
When asked whether his stories about
marriage and divorce draw inspira-
tion from his marriages and divorces,
he can exercise not just plausible deni-
ability but dismay that one would even
broach the question.
This goes some way toward explain-
ing why his former teacher, Gordon
Lish, once compared Lutz’s short sto-
ries favorably to the novels of Philip
Roth, another writer who transforms
sexual desire into a sad, annihilating
thing, but who also insists on brandish-
ing his “reputation as a crazed penis”
on and off the page. “There’s more
truth in one sentence of my student
Gary Lutz than in all of Roth,” boasted
Lish in an interview. “Lutz gives him-
self away.” He does so in fragments and
bits, extending himself to the reader as
a despondent, free-floating voice, an
assembler of strange words, an intruder
on strangers’ thoughts, rather than a
character with any solidity or coher-
ence or sense of purpose.
Disembodying and depersonalizing
narration are well-worn techniques for
getting us closer to the essential, unut-
terable, universally traumatic condi-
tion of being human. “There was in
fact less and less talk, and when she did
speak, it was as if the words were issu-
ing not from her mouth but from some
rent in the murk of her being,” the nar-
rator says about his sister in “Loo.” But
Lutz’s fiction does not tend to silence
or austerity. His language can’t help
but throw its weight around, staging
noisy gatherings of adverbs and violent
pileups of adjectives, running clauses
into one another with a manic fascina-
tion. “This did not sound all that much
like ordinary utterancy,” the narrator
of “Loo” continues. “It came crashing
out of the vocabulary she kept crashing
herself against.” The tension one feels
in all of Lutz’s stories is between the
aggressive eccentricity of his prose and
his narrators’ claims to invisibility. One
expects a little bit of quiet, but it rarely
comes. On impatient days, I hear in his
stories the pleas of a man who plays up
his meekness, his powerlessness, to dis-
tract from the grandiosity he’s going to
ask you to put up with.On patient days, I forgive all this
futzing around with words. I forgive it
because, above all else, Lutz is the best
contemporary American writer and
theorist of loneliness. The last great
theorist was the British psychoanalyst
Melanie Klein, for whom the sense of
loneliness testified to the “unsatisfied
longing for an understanding without
words.” She saw loneliness as a per-
petually elegiac condition: a lament for
the irretrievable loss of “the most com-
plete experience of being understood”
in infancy and the “yearning for an un-
attainable perfect internal state” that
predated the bruising indiscretions
of language. Loneliness could not begrieved or mourned. There was no get-
ting over it, or past it. We were, all of us,
lonely—we would always be lonely—
because we were, invariably, creatures
of language who were estranged by lan-
guage, incapable of clearing the static,
the lag, that muffled the utterances we
dispatched to one another. “The long-
ing to understand oneself is also bound
up with the need to be understood,”
Klein wrote. But understanding—ei-
ther of others, or through others of
ourselves—would always prove elusive.
“I came to language only late and
only peculiarly,” opens Lutz’s essay
“The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” first
delivered as a lecture to MFA students
at Columbia University in September- He recalls a childhood eked out
in a house with no books, save the tele-
phone book and the occasional maga-
zine, and parents who were more likely
to announce their presence by slamming
doors than by speaking. He grew up a
mumbler, a chronic mispronouncer of
words, an expressive misfit. He was a
bookish kid, but not a literary one. “I had
started to gravitate toward books only
because a book was a kind of steady-
ing accessory, a prop, something to grip,
a simple occupation for my hands,” he
writes. He liked how the loose ends of
life collected in the pages of a book—
pretzel crumbs, fingernail peelings, the
hair and skin that comes off when one
holds onto anything too tight. Years
later, his characters would cling with
desperation to objects that preserved
the extrusions of others: bars of soap
covered with unclaimed hairs; “little
scrips of newspaper” that strangers had
spat into; currency with “beseechments
and pleas” scrawled in the margins.
Loneliness became Lutz’s whetting
stone. Against its unyielding weight,
he started to shape his “narratives of
steep verbal topography, narratives in
which the sentence is a complete, por-
table solitude, a minute immediacy of
consummated language.” He learned
that written words, gracefully and
forcefully arranged, could be made to
stay together, to fit just right. In adoles-
cence and early adulthood, he’d seen
the people around him use language in
misjudgment, erring and flat. “A word
that I remember coming out of my par-
ents’ mouths a lot was imagine—as in
‘I imagine we’re going to have rain,’”
he writes. “I soon succumbed to the
notion that to imagine was to claim to
know in advance an entirely forgetta-
ble outcome.” The words he inherited
from them, the words he invented for
himself, were the waste products of in-
timate communication, guttered into
the sentence, which received and heldthem in a separate, autonomous, fic-
tional form. The sentence neither com-
pensated nor consoled him for the loss
of understanding in real life. It was the
unit that gave him the ability to speak,
to exist, in a place apart from that life.
“The Sentence Is a Lonely Place”
hazards all the cloying metaphors of
sex and longing that we encounter in
Lutz’s interviews and stories. Letters
rub off on each other, the sentence de-
scends with all “the force and feel of a
climax,” words “seek out affinities” and
learn that “they cannot live without
each other.” But the lecture contains
something else too, something more
generous and genuinely exhilarating:
Lutz’s close readings of other writers’
sentences as models of literary craft:Press one part of speech into ser-
vice as another, as Don DeLillo
does in “She was always maybe-
ing” (an adverb has been recruited
for duty as a verb) and as Barry
Hannah does in “Westy is colding
off like the planet” (an adjective
has been enlisted for verbified pur-
pose as well.More than the arms and moles of ex-
wives, syntax and grammar excite him.
The possibilities for what one can do
with language start to multiply. “Or
rescue an ordinary, overtasked verb
from its usual drab business and find
a fresh, bright, and startling context
for it,” he proposes, “as Don DeLillo
manages with speaks in ‘You will hit
traffic that speaks in quarter inches’
and Barry Hannah does with the al-
most always lackluster word occurred
in ‘... a single white wild blossom oc-
curred under the forever stunted fig
tree.’” He pauses to admire Elizabeth
Smart’s epigrammatic sentence “Godlikes a good frolic” for “the identical
consonantic shells of God and good”
and “the shared vowel of God and
frolic.” He finds himself encouraged by
Elizabeth Hardwick’s l’s in “Another
day she arrived as wild and florid and
thickly brilliant as a bird.” He reads,
appreciates, thinks, teaches. (He even
manages to make DeLillo’s late prose
seem less boring.)
The sentence is a lonely place, the
essay cries, but then exposes that cry
for the half-truth it is. The sentence
can be raucous, crowded, energetic,
joyful. It can be a place of proxim-
ity without intimacy, or intimacy with
its sentimentality kept in check. It is a
place I can imagine myself dwelling in
forever, never growing tired or bored
or overtasked, always awaiting the next
word, the next thought.The appeal of Lutz’s stories is not their
erotics of art, but the friendly rapport
of reading others’ work respectfully
and intently, getting close to a single
letter, a single sound, without wringing
from it a claustrophobic pantomime
of sexual or emotional intimacy. His
most unforgettable stories are the ones
that set his mannerism against literary
forms that stress the essentially social
nature of language: the index, the aph-
orism, the commonplace book, the in-
terview, the e-mail. These forms, which
he has turned to with increasing fre-
quency as his career progresses, grant
a temporary reprieve from despair and
isolation. They show loneliness to be a
prerequisite for other voices to gather
in—the state in which one can most
accurately and respectfully register
the vibrations of these voices. His tone
becomes lighter, funnier, less labored.
(One can imagine hearing these pieces
read aloud, Lutz pausing for laughter.)
Consider the astonishingly titled
“Heartscald,” divided into twenty-nine
allusive epigrams, any one of which
nudges us across time and space and into
the company of other literary minds:
“Like the Lady in the Play: I have al-
ways depended on the strangeness of
my kind.” Or take “You Are Logged in
as Marie,” about a man guessing his ex-
wife’s answers to her account’s security
questions. Imagining his way into her
mind, voicing her words as faithfully
as he can, he finds his imagination re-
pelled by what he cannot know of her.
When asked to type in a new account
security question, he writes, “We were
a pair of unpairing. Her emails always
started: All,.”
The paradoxes of loneliness brush up
against each other everywhere in Lutz’s
work, but my favorite example of it is a
story titled “Not the Hand but Where
the Hand Has Been.” Arms and hands,
Lutz has said, get “short shrift in fiction,
even though they’re the place where the
trouble between people usually gets its
start.” We are asked to start the trouble
by “putting our finger” on the narrator:
a middle-aged man justly abandoned
by his grown daughter, plodding along
in a marriage of no extraordinary sig-
nificance or satisfaction. “Littlenesses,
piled high, do not suddenly amount
to anything immense,” the narrator
observes. He begins to work as an in-
dexer for a university press, a private,
soothing job. It requires only that he
bear in mind the order of the alphabet
and elaborate a logic for creating and
nesting subheadings under headings:
“The trick is to push your way into theGary Lutz, Pittsburgh, 2019David Nutt