Gary Lutz is an undeservedly obscure short fiction writer living outside Pittsburgh. His first short story collection, Stories in the Worst Way, was first published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1996 and began reprinting in 2002. His second collection, I Looked Alive, was released in 2003 and was followed by a chapbook, Partial List of People to Bleach, in 2007. Lutz has also collaborated on a grammar text book and teaches composition and the occasional short story workshop at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, a small suburban campus where grammar is not allowed. He frequently publishes new stories in Diane Williams’ annual fiction journal NOON. Past Wag’s Revue contributor Dylan Nice interviewed Lutz via email.
Dylan Nice, Wag’s Revue: It seems to me, since I’ve become aware of your work, that people either haven’t heard of you, or they claim you as an influence. Is that your sense of it as well? How do you react to this odd divide?
GARY LUTZ
Gary Lutz is an undeservedly obscure short fiction writer living outside Pittsburgh. His first short story collection, Stories in the Worst Way, was first published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1996 and began reprinting in 2002. His second collection, I Looked Alive, was released in 2003 and was followed by a chapbook, Partial List of People to Bleach, in 2007. Lutz has also collaborated on a grammar text book and teaches composition and the occasional short story workshop at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, a small suburban campus where grammar is not allowed. He frequently publishes new stories in Diane Williams’ annual fiction journal NOON. Past Wag’s Revue contributor Dylan Nice interviewed Lutz via email.
Dylan Nice, Wag’s Revue: It seems to me, since I’ve become aware of your work, that people either haven’t heard of you, or they claim you as an influence. Is that your sense of it as well? How do you react to this odd divide?
Gary Lutz: I’m always surprised to learn that anyone has ever read my fiction, let alone been influenced by it, because I have no identity as a writer. I’ve never sought an audience. I don’t have an agent or an MFA, I’ve never been to AWP, I don’t host a Web site or a blog, my little books slip in and out of print, and I’m not “on the scene,” as one pert prosateur of the most glad-handing sort once put it to me in some winsomely volleyed criticism. My writing is in fact a tiny and shrinking department of my life, though I am not exactly sure what other departments might be in there, either. I do know that I go for months without going near anyone’s fiction, least of all my own. My writing, when I do get around to it, might be nothing more than a sort of cryptic diary into which I now and then pitch some woe, some recent regret, some decisive but satisfying folly or disgrace. Once in a while strangers e-mail me to say that my fiction has afforded them a peculiar sort of consolation, that my writing has left them feeling less alone, or more gratifyingly alone, or better unmoored somehow, and sometimes that is a consolation to me as well, if only for an instant.
DN: You’ve described the work you admire as being “page hugging” as opposed to “page turning,” meaning that every sentence is crafted in a way that seduces and slows the reader. The third sentence of Stories in the Worst Way reads, “In my case, there was a fixed sum of experiences, of people, to or from which I could not yet add or subtract, but which I was skilled at coming to grief over, crucially, in broad daylight.” The sentence is its own universe, clearly labored over, but do you ever worry that this expertness might limit your readership? With such a mastery of language, do you see yourself as writing for other writers?
GL: I see myself as writing for myself, I guess, fussing over the words and marks of punctuation to ensure that I am recording a mood with as much alarming exactitude as I can manage. If I return to a paragraph or a longer sweep of prose months or years later, I expect to find an accurate and intricate rendering of whatever I was feeling when I convoked the words into sentences in the first place—something of the temper, the tone, of my indrawing life at that precise, vanished moment and whatever leanings or inclinations had given a weirder tilt to my world just then. I have too hard a time picturing anyone ever turning the pages of one of my books to worry about what that person might make of having ended up in the privacy of my paragraphs, though my heart no doubt goes out all the same. And shall we face something? Despite all that dreamy speech-course certitude about “messages” and their “senders” and awaiting “receivers” (those textbook diagrams with the perkily curving arrows always make me sad), most communication of any sort is a one-way street anyway. So I’m content with sentences of mine going on for miles and miles—an entire continent’s worth, for that matter—without anyone in any oncoming traffic taking any notice whatsoever.
DN: In writing, you focus on language at the sentence-level, on the nuance of punctuation and grammar. Do you ever fear an obstruction of meaning for the sake of interesting language? Does content ever supersede language in your work?
GL: I try not to trouble myself all that much with meaning. A sentence of mine is a layout of language. What the sentence might be about is of no permanent concern. I’m mostly drawn toward art that resists exegesis. Donald Barthelme, paraphrasing Kenneth Burke in an essay published in 1964, wrote that “the literary work becomes an object in the world rather than a text or commentary upon the world,” and a year later, Susan Sontag, in her essay “On Style,” made an eerily similar statement: “A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.” Both writers eventually backed away from that position, but I buy it.
DN: After rereading Stories in the Worst Way, I’m again taken by the density of detail assigned to narrative circumstances that often remain ambiguous. The sentences have this gravity that pulls my consciousness in and changes its shape. My mind circles one line in “The Smell of How the World Had Ground Itself onto Somebody Else” after the narrator gets a whiff of a kid’s scraped knee and says, “Who hasn’t lived life expressly to avoid having to one day inhale something that entire?” Is this kind of sentence-level effect exclusive to short story? And you’ve pulled it off so many times, do you ever feel you might need a bigger space to work in?
GL: Last summer, I was mucking around with a longish story, toiling in fits and starts on a thing that I tried to trick myself into thinking might, if given the chance, swell into something approaching the length of a very short and fragmentary and elliptical novella (situating a Roman numeral at the head of each segment was supposed to persuade me that I was working on something chapterful, something grander in scale than usual), but now I am not so sure. I don’t know how writers like Christine Schutt and Sam Lipsyte do it, because their novels are as rich and as concentrated by the square inch as their stories are: every page is loaded and thrillsomely replete. I doubt that I will ever prove capable of producing a novel. I seem to feel more in my element in the most cramping of confines.
DN: Many of your stories contain what I would describe as being otherworldly, bizarre, or grotesque details and circumstances. In “The Pavilion” a character figures out how to negate the normal biology of childbearing. The process he discovers remains mostly elliptical—“I had to piece together a diet for her, too. I knew which combinations of which foods on which days would rehang everything that was draped so delicately beneath her skin. In a matter of months, the body under the smock was organized anew, redistributed.” How do you see this quality operating in your stories? GL: The pieces in my first book are probably weirder, more dreamlike in their predicaments and atmospheres, than the pieces in my second book. There may be a simple reason. When I was writing those early stories, I would stagger to my computer as soon as I woke up and before I felt myself felled by the clarities and definitudes of the new day. I would just start writing whatever came to me out of what was left of my sleep, trying to prolong my dream state or at least collect and preserve every last residue of my dreams. I must have been ladling things out of my subconscious. (My sleep in those days was generous to a fault.) I would more often than not be plying myself with chocolate as well. I would often go through a sickening pound of it before lunchtime. Most of the stories in my second book, though, were written on summer afternoons in a windowless basement office in an overchilled building on the outskirts of town, and I would be stuffing myself with those preposterous, pillowy bagels that Dunkin’ Donuts puts out. The day would already feel shot before I got going on a sentence, and there would be too rational a cast to my mind. I was always sleepy, and I sometimes nodded off, but I felt unwelcome in this sleep. It was an ungiving, dream-free species of sleep and did not want me in it, and when I got thrown out, everything felt all the more pinched. I felt cornered in every hour, and my sentences started going angular on me, and my paragraphs kept contracting and contracting. My second book is definitely an older person’s book, an insomniac’s book, the book of somebody shut out of himself for better or worse.
DN: Despite the insertion of the bizarre or the otherworldly, your stories have an incredible connectedness to the world—they often take place in familiar locations like offices or college campuses and involve characters in states of realistic bewilderment. “Home, School, Office” is something of a catalogue of circumstances that ends with the narrator realizing despair during a search for a pubic hair on the floor. Instead of stopping the search because of the indignity of it, the narrator quits because “I did not know up to what point, to what extent, I was supposed to keep going on with my life.” With such a pronounced world-weary voice, what do you find to still to be mysterious? What keeps you doing what you do?
GL: I’m afraid there is nothing I don’t find entirely mysterious, nothing that doesn’t make me feel as if I’ve never once belonged in my life. I am not alone in thinking that other people are unknowable, and there’s nothing that makes me feel more alone than having to keep thinking like that. But the people to whom I’ve been closest have always been the most difficult to fathom or even unveil. Even their faces seemed to destabilize themselves into new forms of unrecognizability under the hardly forceful pressure of my gaze. I would no longer know who the person was that was morphing disorganizingly before my eyes while we were eating or pretending not to be hungry or whatever we did that kept us undefendedly together. I mean, I’d have no steadying sense of what the person truly looked like from one instant to the next. (Then again, I seem to suffer from a touch of what is now called face blindness.) And if the externals are themselves so mutable, there can be no end to speculation about what exactly might be going on inside any human body purposely neighboring your own. There’s no reliable way of finding out. Everything I claim to understand about people is no more than hazarded. So I write to convince myself that I might securely know just one thing, maybe a couple of things, about a person—if only the most persuasive of that person’s reasons for having hated her handwriting at the moment it came time at last to make a list of things that must change absolutely right away or else.
DN: Your characters are often from indeterminate gender, background, and age. They seem broken loose from normative behavior and have remarkable idiosyncrasies that hint at deep psychological jeopardy. I’m thinking of “Certain Riddances,” wherein the narrator makes copies of blank sheets of paper and keeps an almanac of the receptionist’s hosiery. Who are these people? How do you repeatedly create these skewed lenses?
GL: Although little in my fiction comes from real life, I was all but mute until my mid-twenties, and if you’re as quiet as I was, the loons and screwballs will find you soon enough, and there goes your baseline of normalcy. I’ve witnessed peculiarity aplenty. And I have the disadvantage of apparently looking like a lot of other people, because I am often accosted by strangers who take for granted I am someone they know, and they insist on resuming conversations broken off long ago and throw fits when I can’t supply the precise lines of flattery or remorse they have been waiting all this long while to hear. A friend of mine once sent me an article scissored from The National Enquirer or some other redoubtable gazette, and the scarehead was something like “Is Your Neighbor a Space Alien?” The article ran down the inventory of telltale behaviors, and I had the entire array. As for gender, it looks to me as if it’s been getting harder and harder for people to heed the distinctions. It’s the females who are reinvigorating virtuous masculinity, and it’s the males who are bringing a refreshed animation to the feminine. So the bugginess and obsessions and sexual instabilities of my characters, in short, are probably never that far from home, though they mostly just come crashing out of the vocabulary I keep crashing myself against.
DN: I find that your characters’ verbal interactions are in total tonal agreement with the exposition. The stories seem to demand that the characters say the things they do. I’m thinking of another example from “The Pavilion,” where upon meeting the girl, the man asks: “‘Complete this sentence: Here it must be said that…’” To which the girl responds, “‘Here it must be said that I just want to get the duration over with.’” This is a more revealing exchange than typically ever happens in speech. Is it more important that dialogue be in agreement with reality or the artifice of the fiction?
GL: I’d say the latter. Anyway, few writers can produce even passable dialogue, and I am not one of them. I usually skim or skip the yatter while I’m reading, because too much of it is usually makeweight, filler. There is very little talk in my fiction, and when my characters are quoted, I suppose it’s as if the words are issuing not from their mouths but from some rent in the murk of their being. It’s the penetralia speaking for once. So what comes out probably doesn’t much like ordinary utterancy.
DN: I’ve heard you say that film is the most efficient way to tell a story. You’ve said you have watched Ghost World and Wendy and Lucy more than a hundred times each. What is it about these two movies that compels you? And what is it that a fiction can capture that is out of the visual’s reach?
Is this dichotomy in capacity an absolute, or should writers feel more threatened than we already do?
GL: Most people consume the world primarily through their eyes and ears, and nothing captures the full visual and aural stream of experience as persuasively as film can. So I’d never try to compete with movies. Fiction terrorizes us with the inner voice that won’t shut up, that won’t put an end to alarming us with the otherness of its formulations, the frights of its unrelaxing mindfulness.
I’ve watched Wendy and Lucy at least one hundred and fifty times, and that news is usually greeted with a certain clinical concern. But nobody seems to find it strange if you listen to a CD that many times. Wendy and Lucy lacks any music on the soundtrack other than a stray snatch of melody that Wendy hums solacingly to herself (an elaboration of that melody appears as Muzak in the scene in a supermarket), but the movie somehow works on me the way a perfect album or a perfect song works on me. The movie is like a long song I can’t stop wanting to hear. It’s lyrically balladic. Its scenes are like verses. It could be a hidden track on Belle and Sebastian’s This Is Just a Modern Rock Song EP, from 1998.
DN: Having been in one of your workshops, I know you take a directive approach—you’re not reluctant in pointing out dull sentences, sentiments, psychologies, or descriptions. I have drafts in which words are circled and the question “Inevitable verb?” or “Inevitable adjective?” is asked in the margin. You seem to teach style as a means to content. Is this something you picked up from your own education with Gordon Lish? What is the most pressing idea in your mind when you’re teaching writing?
GL: I teach fiction writing only rarely, and when I do, I start with the assumption that the enrollees have already been sufficiently harangued about rising action, character development, conflict, setting, and the like, or whatever else supposedly goes into a supposed story. I can’t help bringing my own unconcealed limitations, prejudices, notions, and desires to the proceedings. I can’t forget that fiction is words, that a story is a serving of palpated verbal material with feelings surging through it, and not just some caboodle of data about fabricated people and their antics. If a reader is asked again and again to travel the distance between a capital letter and a period, every sentence ought to have been routed through the writer’s nervous system and acquired charged particles of language along the way. A sentence ought to be offering a vista of the infinite. What you get more often than not, though, is souvenirs of somebody else’s experience and not the experience itself. Whatever I might know about writing I learned solely from Gordon Lish. I am forever his student and forever in his debt.
DN: You introduced me to Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, which I now consider to be something of a sacred document, and I know you also hold it in very high regard. In both your work and Johnson’s, I sometimes experience a disbelief that a real person in the world produced what I’m seeing on the page—this ability to communicate reality in terms of revelation. So, I guess my question is at what cost to your humanity are such revelations realized?
GL: Well, my humanity, such as it is, would have been misemployed no matter what direction I might have taken in life, but, no question, I’ve frightened people away, I’ve lost time in bulk, I’ve let many a thing slide, I’ve failed to thrive, I’ve had to live in unvivid misery, and all, I guess, for a few puny, largely unregarded collections of batched keystrokes. On the other hand, were it not for my occasional stabs at writing, a few intent and courageous souls would not have now and then charged into my life in enlargening ways and, in departing, brought a better grade of sorrow into my world, broadened my agony, or at least seen fit to make sport of me in grander forums. So it’s—what do they call it?—a toss-up.
DN: I know who you consider to be your contemporaries—Lish, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte. You share the same style of this exacting syntax, where the next word is selected based on the sound of the words that precede it. But who do you see as being a predecessor of yours in terms of earlier 20th century literature? What are you working on that someone else started?
GL: There’s doubtless no trace in my writing of the stylists I probably most wanted to imitate—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salinger, mid- and later Updike, early John O’Hara, Whitney Balliett, Elizabeth Hardwick, Cioran, Barthes. I didn’t start reading Beckett’s prose until after my first book came out (all I’d known was a few of the plays, and I wasn’t that crazy about any of them). Donald Barthelme’s work annoyed me until I finally discovered how to read it, and then I fell for it and fell hard. John Ashbery’s work, too. Elizabeth Smart.
DN: You have expressed a reluctance to mention brand names in your stories—your reason being that they unnecessarily date the fiction. The only brand I found was McDonald’s, in the story “Recessional.” So, since this isn’t a story, what brand-name products would you endorse, given this opportunity?
GL: I don’t necessarily support an embargo on references to brand names (it’s place names that make my skin crawl), but I do regret mentioning McDonald’s in Stories in the Worst Way, even though the customer’s deconstruction and reassembling of the hamburger at the end of “Recessional” is something I witnessed firsthand at a turbulent McDonald’s in downtown Reading, Pennsylvania. My thinking must have been that the reader needed to know that the little bit of berserkery I described took place in an outlet of a fast-food chain and not in an independently owned dispensary, and in my vast experience of imperiling myself with burgers and fries, I’ve found that McDonald’s has the greatest quotient of crazies among its customer base. Coca-Cola is the only brand name in I Looked Alive, but I substituted “soda” in the second edition. I’ve eaten lunch at Burger King almost every day for the past fifteen years or thereabouts, but I have never put that into a story, though an aborted graphic novella on which I was collaborating with the artist Tom Davis has a little downhearted and untender chapter set in a Burger King. I guess I swear by Burger King as much as I’ve ever sworn by anything, but there’s only one particular Burger King to which I remain true. The imagery in the chapter, though, came from a BK in the Pacific Northwest.
DN: Your stories often have an extremely subtle and wry humor in them. I have, however, laughed audibly here and there. The name of this magazine, Wag’s Revue, borrows an outdated word, wag, which means an habitual wit, a joker. Who is your favorite wag, and why? It can be someone from your life, history, literature…
GL: Easy: S. J. Perelman (1904-1979), an all but forgotten virtuoso of the sentence and the proprietor of perhaps the most bedazzling vocabulary of any twentieth-century American writer, though he’s now unfortunately remembered, if at all, for his work on the screenplays of two Marx Brothers movies than for his dozen or so collections of comic essays, or feuilletons, as he preferred to call them. His pieces don’t often hold together as satisfying wholes, and there was a falling off in even the facture of the sentences themselves in the later decades of his career, but I can’t think of anyone else, other than Sam Lipsyte, who has written so many sentences at once perfect and perfectly hilarious.
