Look: a man who is not me but whose accomplishments are similar (he was the son of some parents, got himself schooled around, circumstanced himself aplenty, placed himself squarely and irreversibly in the employ of somebody who could be counted on to walk all over him, etc.) found a new way to cheat on his wife. This was not the way that everybody else was cheating at the time.
"I hate when it all gets languaged around like this," writes one of the narrator's of Garielle Lutz's collection Stories in the Worst Way. The quality of being "languaged around" is one of my favorite things about Lutz's fiction, starting with the precisely aloof metaphor, the "meteorites of fried chicken" described as "casketed" in their paper box. But I also thought about Jonathan Franzen's recent comments that he puts a book down when he gets to the second cliche. It seems to me that a really great writer has an interest in, pays an attention to cliche, which are little ossifications of shared meaning. Lutz is great at interrogating cliche and wrenching it just out of place, as when one narrator describes their wife as having "given up on me hand and foot," or when another writes: "Then came nights when, lying awake beside my final wife, I would spent too much time putting my finger on what was wrong. I was wearing the finger out." Phrases find themselves wedged into strange new context, sentences that reveal the strange possibilities of grammar: "And here comes what your life will never be the same after which, the same way mine has already never been."
The characters in Lutz's stories are slightly alienated from language, standing just off to the side of it, as they stand slightly outside their own lives. It is entirely possible that each of these stories has the exact same narrator. They go "rivering" around their anonymous suburbs and work in underpaid, underheralded jobs, like adjuncting. They have sex, or don't, and what that adds up to in either case is never all that clear. Some are clearly marked as men or women, but others occupy a kind of indeterminate space, less non-binary than simple non-essential. On gender, Lutz writes: "This much is figured out: the thing about being a girl is that stuff gets stuck inside you--but with a boy, stuff goes away and never comes back. A boy keeps losing himself. A boy just keeps watching himself run out. How much should this explain?" The stories themselves answer not much, because gender here is subject to slippages and indeterminacies that reveal a deeper sense of alienation and ennui. The characters have feelings of isolation and powerlessness that have everything to do with gender, but not their gender, if that makes any sense. A recurring idea is the character who is somehow not in their own story, how whatever "the story" is, is separate from them.
Lutz is one of those writers who sounds only like themself, which I think is probably the greatest possible achievement a writer can manage. So I found these stories very reminiscent of her later collection Divorcer. The differences are small: the stories in this collection are numerous and shorter; the weakest, I thought, were the flash pieces that pointedly avoid the overbearing nature of subject and narrative. The best stories are those that, being longer, reminded me more of Divorcer, as with "Not the Hand But Where the Hand Has Been," about a narrator whose job is to write the indexes for books. Struggling to understand their daughter, this narrator writes an index for them ("subclothes of," "parents of, constructive potshots taken at"). There are stories about shitting your pants and eating cum. Those, in fact, are the best ones, the ones that root the "languaging around" in the terrible and frightening physical experience of having and being a body. But how much should this explain?
