Gary Lutz: I Looked Alive

Reading Gary Lutz feels a little bit like being punched in the face by a full-size kangaroo in captivity. I mean that in the sense that a freak animal, too much human to be trusted trapped in a box, could break one’s nose with the shocking sort of indifference to its gait, black, beady eyes staring back, piercing something deep inside. Read Gary Lutz and I can’t remember my mantra: None of us is without horseshit on his face. But reading Gary Lutz is Gary Lutz reading you reading Gary Lutz is let’s continue.

The languagescape in which these stories unwind scares the crap out of me. Peaks and valleys reminiscent of late Beckett, the black sky becoming gray as in certain of Burroughs’ storm clouds, electricity in the air, the eminent, barely felt bursts of Stein’s sudden statements, the smell of rain seen in Pynchon, the fecundity in Ashbery’s proportion. To say that Gordon Lish looms over all of this would be disingenuous – Lutz is well known to be a pupil, but the truth is I don’t see his shadow on these walls. I don’t know. Maybe that says more about Lish than it does about Lutz. I guess if I take it in and think about the firmness of the walls. Whatever. A question: Why are so many writers given to salivation at the mere mention of Gary Lutz? Read him. Personally, I will be ripping pieces from his work for pasting at my own pace for years to come. Probably he would find me ripping it the wrong way, lazily probably. But that’s okay. It’s out there. And I’m in here. He likes following rules more than me. And sure, he spends more time.

Admittedly or even essentially, this book, if any by Lutz, is not a good rend for your commute to and from the thing you do at the place this loathes – side-speaking trash bums will totally derail your plane of thought here, and that is a thing you don’t want here – in the soft spaces of home or the park or the beach on a sunless day, there is where Lutz is a real man for your real job. Reading is writing. And yet, much too much has been made of the difficulty inherent to watching his work. I say watch because it’s easier to think of it as passing you by. The French for work, travail comes from another meaning “travel.” Certainly, it isn’t easy. Traveling with Lutz, one must I think remain solidly in place. However, he makes amends. Attention in place one can swallow the cream-top he rends from the milk of human cramming. Yum. People are doing it. To say it isn’t fun is to say you don’t find it funny. Okay. He is a serious man making serious work to be chewed upon seriously. It is a soft chew. But to say that the work, darkly gorgeous and glowing as it is, pregnant as it totally is, becoming and coming to take your breath away is somehow humor-not, would be broadly to miss the point shy of the scope, bruising the rim of your mind’s eye socket – don’t do that, take a good grip and lean in; take a broad, general view of things. That’s better. See now how everything up here is slightly as precise as it is a kind of vague, ambiguous focus maintained by way of reflecting exactly as roughly what it means to “look alive.”

Picture someone at a large publishing company rejecting Gary Lutz because he is “too difficult to read” before going to lunch at the Four Seasons, laughing something-something sucking snails going “this guy thinks he’s Proust or some shit but I need the numbers where are the numbers you’ve got the numbers” over a pair of sparkling cocktails with Nicholas Sparks or whoever is topping the charts, eating that pie, farting in the stalls the trough the place we meet thinking Gary Lutz wondering why is he haunting me with those words the places the thoughts in this trough. Knopf published his first book, Stories In The Worst Way. That was 1996. Since then it has been up to small presses – 3^rd Bed/Calamari, Future Tense, and Brooklyn Rail’s Black Square Edition – to make his books into books you can buy so you can hold in your hands. Maybe that shouldn’t be part of it. But it is. And I guess I do like it a little. Holding things is nice. I’m glad for small presses to have him and yet.

Some things Gary Lutz brings to your coffee table in this collection. The full range of language is on display here like an epic mosaic featuring all the different kinds of clouds in the sense that he leaves nothing out. The air must be so heavy. Making adverbs from words most would never think of doing adverbially, such as rainily, as in “Everything he now wore smelled rainily of the iron.” Or magicianly as in “. . . an arm inclinable to languorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air.” Punning plentiful as in “The obit ran the next morning with just one misprint: ‘chaise lozenge.’” Those are everywhere. There is no sense speaking of alliteration because it’s there the way there are tragically few letters everywhere. Not without using the negative in quips like, “This is the brother who ‘tonsured’ his arms and legs. ‘The well-groomed man,’ he insisted, ‘is never not shaving.’” Or else the negative of the non sequitur of sorts, “My reading matter is the warnings on the backs of cleaning products. I have the bottles lined up on the bathroom floor. The stickers come right out and say Do Not.” Waxing romantical on literature, “He drove a mutt of a car and was the lone typewriter mechanic left in the territory, a servicer of devastated platens, a releaser of stuck keys.” Gorgeous bits on language, “My life had come to be a wee thing. / And my hearing was practically shot. Sometimes it was only the vowels that reached me. / They came out of his mouth like pastels.” Spinning poetical yarns into heartbreaking jokes, “Then my young man called to give me some guff about a shirt. (It is said, isn’t it, that you ‘make’ love because it’s otherwise not really there?)” And again for good measure, “He explained that the most to be expected of anyone in his circumstance (the world was hard put to keep itself looking full) was to have both a girlfriend and a boyfriend, in hopes that the two would cancel each other out and leave him at the center of an enlarged, more encompassing loneliness.” The commas, the commas, oh my god the impeccable commas leave you thinking, I’m a dummy. As well as those parts that knee you in the patriot flag, “She was a hard-boned girl afraid her heart would halt between beats. She went around with her hand covering it, until somebody finally said, ‘Must you always be pledging allegiance?’” And on occasion, almost everything at once, “There was one who divided the world into ‘have-nots and half-wits,’ and another whose money had pieces of other money paper-clipped to it, and their ilk was always more likable than mine, because I am of the kind that picks the wrong week to have finally had it with people. / My young man, though: I watched him pull from his tongue a hair displaying itself as a perfect, plucky ampersand.”

Some things Gary Lutz does not bring to the round table in this collection. Who, What, Why, When, Where. Where-not, When-not, Why-not, What-not, Who-not. A journalism junky knows nothing in this is relevant to literature. Gary Lutz writes a lot of letters to the editor. I think none of those W’s matter because they are there whether or not anyone is calling attention to them, telling about them. They are the narrative. It is a thing. What we want or what I want or what I think I want anyway, is the things that are almost not happening and yet are the happening. That is to say that there is I think only actually the How in what I would call literature. In Lutz, we are not different, we are more all like one thing: a big mess of hair is How. He brings out the microscope, in fact it’s all the time out. That’s how it reads. It’s a brutal way of seeing life he shows. The telling is a thing left told by others. His is the anti-journalism.