Gary Lutz: I Looked Alive

Like Stein and many after her, Lutz is not so much writing as weaving a patch quilt. But his is much tighter than hers. Or he cuts a lot out, throws it in the trash. I don’t know. Maybe because I think I know this of his process, it’s hard to weed that out of the reading as a thing I am doing.

Perhaps the most beautiful of the stories here, to my ears and eyes was “I Was in Kilter with Him a Little,” one of the best I’ve read in I don’t know how long. It is a novel. If one should be anthologized, canonized, whatever, this is it. For more on my thoughts concerning that, I said this on HTMLGIANT.

As a writer, a careful reading of Lutz can provide you the allowance to do things you might not have known or thought you could do. To say reading it will not make you a better writer is like saying it’s never going to rain again.

As a reader, careful reading of Lutz can loan you permission to be as morally dubious as you already are, as you want to be. You will feel smarter, and you will have something rad to throw someone’s way when you want to see them awe struck the way they’ll be when they hold their mouth open while reading this probably maybe.

If writing is rewriting and reading is writing, then rereading is rewriting and that is good. I can look at a wall for about a week without noticing the graffiti. There is empathy enough here for anyone, so long as you are willing to commit to the work, to the act of reading and probably rereading it. Passive reading? I don’t know how you can do that with this text. And that’s maybe the best, least thing I can say at it. Like the directions on the back of a shampoo bottle, Apply. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Enjoy.