Divorcer by Garielle Lutz

Divorce, I kept forgetting, is not the opposite of marriage; it's the opposite of wedding. What comes after divorce isn't more and more of the divorce. What came after, in my case, was simply volumed time, time in solid form, big blocks of it to be pushed aside if I ever felt up to it, though more often than not I arranged the blocks about me until I had built something that should have been some sort of stronghold but in fact was just another apartment within the apartment in which I was already staying away from mirrors, shaving by approximation, bathing in overbubbled water that kept my body out of sight.

The title story of Garielle Lutz's collection Divorcer begins with a woman leaving her partner and moving in with the narrator. They live a short and fitful marriage--we learn later it was only five weeks--before divorcing him. While signing the papers, the divorce lawyer beckons the narrator below the table, and then reveals his penis. ("No need for you to touch it... But can you at least admit how much you've gladdened it? it's not been glad like this all day. It's a gladiolus. So, Mister Man, what would be a very nice last straw?") A reminder, perhaps, that the old dreary rigamarole of marriage-to-divorce is only one of the many ways that people couple. Yet so many of us do it. We are compelled to marry, compelled to divorce. All of the stories in Divorcer feature narrators going through the process of coupling and then parting. Though in several important ways they are all different--they are men and women, gay and straight--the alienating effects of divorce and separation strike them all.

The second story, "The Driving Dress," begins with a man trying to lose weight to fit into his ex-wife's dresses. (A symbol of isolation and alienation, the need to become self-sufficient, that echoes, I would note, the cafe owner in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.) Amateur gumshoes might read this, and the small detail in "Divorcer" about how the narrator uses the creams and deodorants his wife has left behind, as foreshadowing of Lutz's own transition in 2021. (I'm sorry to say I saved a few dimes by buying a used copy of Divorcer with a deadname on the cover.) But I think it also points to a richness and fluidity of gender that the novel captures well, the ways that our needs and desires of having and being spill out over the containers of gender and sex. The abstraction of Lutz's language--maybe "abstraction" is not right, but a fleeing from the staid writerliness of the object and the moment--makes it so that the lesbian narrator of "To Whom Might I Have Concerned?" seems like they might be the same as the narrator of "Divorcer," with only that one minor aspect of their identity changed.

What makes these stories so incredible, really, is the language. Lutz is one of those few writers--Joy Williams is another--who demands that you take every sentence slow, read every word, because every word is a shock and a surprise. The prose is full of misprisions, words used incorrectly but somehow perfectly, and neologisms: sloppage, quillwise, rumpus-assed. Turn the page and find a brilliant, strange sentence: "The sister's kids smelled like pets." Sentences that take an unforeseeable turn: "All she did, I think, was take one gracious, simple, short-lived piss while I stood by." Sentences that go on and on, in wonderful swervings: "To cut things short: she was mortally thirty and was drown now to the uncomely, the miscurved, the dodged-looking and otherwise unpreferred, so my body must have naturally been a find--breasts barely risen, putty-colored legs scrimping on sinew, knees that looked a little loose, teeth provocative and unimproved." After all this time, it's amazing to find that there are writers out there who can write in ways that you've never thought possible, or even imagined.