Customer Reviews

Stories in the Worst Way

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Susan Sontag speaks of the need for getting back to the sensous surface of art, to see what stories provide that fascinates in and of themselves. Gary Lutz is one of the few writers who actually gets there. His stories are sinuous, the sentences tightly wound, words spilling out in ways we don't expect. Lutz' stories cut right through to the heart of what makes us what we are. Rather than dilemmas and big tragedies and conflicts, the situations of these characters consist of the daily, little human hang-ups we all have: "If I have a problem, it is this: there is a story in which everything costs a dollar." These little hang-ups add up to large blots on the self, to full blown obsessions and compulsions. In his scrutiny of the family and of the social rituals that we use to bind our lives together, Lutz can be both funny and merciless, calmy telling us, for instance, that "The wedding was curt and almost entirely without result." It is the movement between the humorous and the disturbed, the ability to show the dark and light faces of the same situation, that gives Lutz his strength. A funny and disturbing book, Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way is an auspicious debut. -- Brian Evenson (evenson@osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu)

Lutz is a master wordsmith. He is Pablo Neruda chained to a wall, injected with heroin and winched in hard between American culture and a hard place. He is Sherwood Anderson nauseated by time travel. He is Thomas Pyncheon finally equipped with the brevity in the soul of wit. He is Kurt Vonnegut leaking sad little pools of schadenfreude.
The sad reverberations of his comedy and the comic undertones of his tragedy are so subtly realized that his grace may escape you if let it. Don't let it . The ghosts of our discontent orbit through his stories with dismal whimsy. It's the best collection of short stories of the last half century. Lutz can do in three paragraphs what it takes others a novel to accomplish.
Extraordinary writer, haunting book.

Gary Lutz is to postmodernism what Henry Miller was to modernism, it's as simple as that. Here we have a writer who deserves to be cannonized, by his unique aplomb, cutting-edge wit, incomparable story-craft, and sensitivity to social issues pervading our culture of commodity and appearances...and yet he's outright ignored by the "Establishment." There is no hope for those glib, irony-insensitive, self-righteous critics who think of his work as overbaked and pretentious...he's obviously trying to use his style to make a valid point or two. Go back to the classroom and stop trying to impress us all with your fashionably hateful and derived commentary.

Fragments of an unfulfilled life. Lutz is an urban Carver with a sophisticated grasp on grammar. Sparse and exact, this is smart language. Every sentence is a feat, an accomplishment in perspective. To read this book fast is to miss the point. Sit with the incredible delicacy of Gary's prose and you begin to understand why Gordon Lish felt publishing "Stories in the Worst Way" was more important than keeping his own job.

Where the hell did this guy come from? How come there's no picture of him on the book? Why isn't he world famous?! This amazing collection is like nothing I've ever read. Bits of smug language mixed with chunks of black humour and inventive story construction will make your head spin!

I suspect the only audience for "Stories in the Worst Way" will be other writers - no one else is likely to have heard of Lutz (or even Gordon Lish, for that matter) and his stories haven't and won't ever find an appreciative mainstream audience.

Lutz's prose is really interesting, the way that he invents and re-invents words and constructs sentences in bizarre fragments. After reading "Stories ..." I was honestly inspired to start playing with language and taking risks with my own writing. Unfortunately, Lutz's characters and stories are poorly developed and dreadfully boring. Every narrator is a repellant, self-loathing neurotic. Every story just sort of starts, meanders around for awhile and then ends. Nothing happens. The man can really write prose but his stories frankly suck.

I'm giving this three stars only because Lutz approach to language is so different and fresh, but that is the only reason to read "Stories in the Worst Way."

This word--I know what it means even though I'm sure it's made-up. That's the kind of edge that Gary Lutz dances on and gleefully. He will surprise a reader with a turn of phrase or a turn of plot or character that elicits a gasp and sometimes also a guffaw. I particularly loved "The Daughter," the last story in the book, where the narrator creates an index about his daughter. "Inconsolably okay, 00" This book is inconsolably underread.

This book, the first and still the only collection by one of America's most unappreciated writers, hits so hard in so many places that it's hard to find a starting point. Lutz's language is thickly woven and can be off-putting to the uneducated reader. However, his subjects also put off the most educated, leaving his audience spare. The fact that today's critics can walk around so high-and-mighty is a travesty to the world of literature, because it is spreading, and we are seeing a day where Lutz and his contemporaries are dismissed because they dare too much. Keep daring, Gary, and we will keep fighting for you.

There is a great bit of wisdom uttered by Lee, the doomed narrator of Boris Vian's I Spit On Your Graves:

"It costs a lot to put out a book, and all the dressing is for a good purpose -- it shows clearly too that most people don't care about getting good books: what they really want is to have read the book recommended by their club, the book of the moment, and they don't give a rap about the contents."

It is a very spot-on sentiment and one that sadly pertains to Gary Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way. When it was originally released in 1996 Lutz's collection of challenging and off-kilter short stories were dismissed, denounced, or simply ignored. In spite of being a protégée of renowned editor Gordon Lish -- who inspired the author to scrape and claw at his prose, boiling it down to thin razor while also developing an approach to the English language that can only be perceived as one author rewriting our entire syntax -- Lutz's work was greeted as warmly as syphilis. When the collection was re-released in 2003 by 3rd Bed, it faired not much better. Perhaps greeted as warmly as gonorrhea.

The simple fact is that Stories in the Worst Way was not that book. It's intent was obvious: not to reward or connect with the reader, but to challenge. As Lutz himself stated, "if I had been assigned to review it, I probably would've panned it myself. It's not the kind of book that's asking for any wide welcome."

Lutz's prose is not easy reading. Often, you have to go back, reread a sentence over and over again, chewing the prose until it finally digests itself into your brain. Of course using a vocabulary that seems to mine the dark recesses of Webster's dictionary also does not help the book's cause.

Take the following paragraph which is bound to throw fans of plain-spoken verbiage:

"Before the husband who kept leaving left for good, he accused me of two things: hirsutism and `self dependence.' It is true that I had hair scribbled fine-pointedly over my arms and the backs of my hands and a few other places. It is also true that I liked to keep the marriage almost entirely to myself. There was more to get out of it that way."

The effect created is that Lutz's prose is precise - cutting and biting - and sludgy, drawing you into the muck of his character's wayward lives. The cast is a collection of first-person misfits, malcontents, and outsiders. There is the office drone, who because of the efficiency of his work ethic, spends most of his time tormenting his co-workers in "Certain Riddances." ("At first whenever the pressure to respond was acute - maybe every other day - I would simply slide an anonymous, index-carded `True' or `False' into her mail slot."). Or the unfortunate high school teacher with a bad case of colitis in the aptly titled "Slops." ("After each class, I lumped my way to whichever men's room my notebook said was next. My life was an ambitious program of self-centrifugalization. I was casting myself out.") Or the eternal ex-husband recounting his past wives and the negative impact of their cohabitation in "Devotions." ("From time to time I show up in myself just long enough for people to know they are not in the room alone.")

As you dig through Lutz's stories, you cannot help but be in awe of the sheer force of his creativity, his ability to break literary conventions down and reconstruct it all in his own twisted form. He is the type of writer that makes you exclaim, "Crap, I wish I had written that line." "Sleeveless" is as close as you can get to a perfectly crafted short story. It is all of 174 words and yet it hits you square in the gut with the tale of a husband being forced to give up his wife.

However this leads to a dilemma. Namely that often, Lutz's bold experimentation doesn't work. It falls flat, failing miserably. His love of language often causes him to overwrite characters, giving them voices that are either too introspective or frankly too damn educated for their insinuated background. After reading through the 36 stories in the collection (some as short as a single page), you are often left with the impression that you've been reading about the same character the entire time, simply cut and paste into a new identity. "That Which Is Husbander Than Anything Prior" comes off as rehash of Slops (minus the obvious fecal problems and swapping out the gender). Or even worse, stories such as "The Preventer of Sorrows" or "Their Sizes Run Differently" are so introspective and disjointed that they make no impact, leaving the reader feeling as if they've just reviewed a psychoanalyst's report of a patient interview rather than a short story.

To be brutally honest, I don't think Lutz cares. He'd rather push the prose in order to create something unique, as opposed to something likeable or readable. And in some ways there is much to be admired in that.

Stories in the Worst Way is nowhere near perfect, but like its grotesque narrators, there is beauty within the flaws.

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Well..I am not an official expert 'reviewer of literature' so I don't won't declare this as GOOD or DRIVEL, since I don't know officially what makes or breaks so-called 'good' literature. When I read I am not analyzing 'it' I am just 'feeling' and sensing..and if it is compelling, I continue to pick up the book til the last page. I just know what I like, and this book made my heart sing with both the greatness of life, as well as acknowledging the darkest, darks imaginable in life. It made me smile, wince, think and laugh. This book indeed was shocking and gross in parts. To me that is a good read...a book that makes you think, makes your soul sing in parts...even tho I would NOT recommend it to my 80yr old mother..(too dark and etc) I liked this book cover, that's part of the reason I bought it. I thought..what an odd pairing. Each story seemed to have those aspecs..odd things that you'd never think of putting together in the same story. I bought it in 2003 on a trip to Powells in Portland-it was in the indebpendent writers area.

Also in refernce to the Henry Miller comment in the review above..I tried to read Tropic of Cancer..or Capric? after reading rave reviews about how .bla bla bla it was..and I found it vulgar and without any intrinsic value or plot. Seemingly an egotistical rant, but that's me. I put Henry Miller down and vowed to leave him out of my bookshelf..I've seen the movies about him..he seems to be a selfish, troubled, boorish, pig...who cares.We've had so many more examples of people like him since that his value now to me is quite overrated.
I gladly moved on John Knowles 'a separate peace' what I found to be a well written, enjoyable story.
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