Reviewed by Steve Himmer
10.6.07

It’s easy enough to categorize Gary Lutz with that faint bit of praise: “a writers’ writer,” but doing so takes the easy way out of engaging his unique, complex stories. And the easy route is something Lutz doesn’t allow himself, his fiction, or the language he uses. His work displays a rare unity in which each word and sentence reflect the larger story and its characters, weaving together form and function, art and craft to reward thoughtful reading and rereading.

As in his earlier collections, the stories in Lutz’ latest book, Partial List of People to Bleach, are plotted in only the most tangential ways and are deceptive in their brevity. Each story greets the reader like a puzzle, composed from elements never obvious or expected. The fleeting, hazy moments of Lutz’ fiction are seldom long enough to create a false sense of clarity, because as one character says, “The only way to ruin your eyes is to keep looking at people.” They are just the right length to be read quickly and reconsidered for hours and days afterward. Though the collection is only a slim (fifty-six pages), it’s a slow read because the mind gets so caught up making sense of, and savoring what has been read. Moving from one story on to the next is harder than with more conventional, familiar writing: there are no easy descriptions here.

Most of Lutz’ stories concern down-and-out, outcast, and often disturbing characters with awkward obsessions and kinks. The protagonist of the opening story, “Home, School, Office,” is a college professor who admits to, even revels in, being disliked by his students and largely incompetent in his profession. Partial List of People to Bleach teems with incestuous families, damaged children, and men and women as coldly distant from the world and each other such as the narrator in “I Was in Kilter with Him a Little,” who describes her former husband as “largely a passerby.” She goes on to say that

He had an unconsoling side, this husband, and a mean streak, and a pain that gadded about in his mouth, his jaw, and there was a bumble of blond hair all over him, and he couldn’t count on sleep, on dreams, to get a done day butchered improvingly.

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.

I would let him go broadly and unwitnessed into his day.

So much of what makes Lutz’ stories distinctive, difficult and worthwhile is in the above passage—the characters viewing one other only from a distance, reflected in the language of “this husband” with no hint of possession or closeness; the descriptions of lives assembled from disjointed, apparently unrelated details, relying on the reader to put them together; and sentences built the same way, out of phrases like “get a done day butchered improvingly,” insisting on genuine effort to work out exactly what’s meant despite each word being familiar in isolation. The stories of this collection are studded with details that jar and jab the reader in the same way the aforementioned wife goes on to relate how she “thumbed out most of the teeth from a comb of his, stuck them upright in rough tufts of our carpet—whatever it took to get a barefoot person hurt revolutionarily.” This description could also apply to Lutz’s stories, which strip bare our preconceptions about fiction and how it functions, then hurt us as revolutionarily as the hidden teeth of a comb.

In “Six Stories,” a series of ambiguously connected vignettes, the narrator waits “for someone to say something in a language that wasn’t shot.” Gary Lutz offers just such a language, uniting his characters and his readers in a challenge to make sense of the world through details ordinary enough on their own but brought together in unexpected, puzzling ways, and the world is made new in the process. Whereas other authors rely on fantasy to achieve this recreation, Lutz turns the supposedly banal and mundane into anything but, and reminds us of the constant negotiations of confusion and construction that life—and, at its best, literature—demands. It isn’t always, or often, pleasant, but it is as rich with possibility as an observation made by the child narrator of “Tic Douloureux”:

That day I began to develop an appreciation for how things upstairs sounded to people underneath. From every footfall, every stride, came a creak that rippled outward until it overspread the entire ceiling of the room. The effect was one of resounding activity, of achievements far and wide.