April 16, 2006
Gary Lutz interview
(Until May 1, most of the content posted to this site will comprise links to other essays, stories, blogs, and news items. I am facing down several deadlines that will likely keep me from posting original content.)
The writer Gary Lutz came up in a phone conversation I had with a friend on Friday afternoon. I have never read Gary Lutz's short stories, nor have I read much writing by Ben Marcus, the author to whom I speculatively linked him. When Lutz's collection Stories in the Worst Way was published, I read a sharply critical review of the book, filed his name away, and didn't seek out other commentary. Then, in February, The Believer published an interview with him that reversed my earlier impression. I am now in search of a copy of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, which contains a piece by Lutz and was edited, coincidentally, by Marcus. (Marcus also blurbs Stories in the Worst Way, saying: "Gary Lutz is a sentence writer from another planet, deploying language with unmatched invention. He is not just an original literary artist, but maybe the only one to so strenuously reject the training wheels limiting American narrative practice. What results are stories nearly too good to read: crushingly sad, odd, and awe-inspring.")
The Believer interview (not all posted online) offers an endearing portrait of the self-deprecating artist. Here are a few quotes:
BLVR: When you manipulate words like this, is it a technical process? Are you using many reference materials? Or is it mostly intuitive?GL: I think that a lot of what I seem to be doing when I try to get from one end of a sentence to the other—a crossing that can take hours, days, weeks—is introducing words to each other that in ordinary circumstance would never meet . . . because I have some other hunch that they belong together, even though anyone else might write them off as entirely incompatible. I guess I work my way through a sentence by instigating these relationships—a perverse sort of matchmacking, apparently—and then to keep the words from getting too cozy, I might reach for an uncstomary preposition that plunges the sentence into some queasy depths. The whole undertaking seems to be alrgely intuitive and probably unnatural.
[ . . . ]
BLVR: Your acceptance of ambiguity seems more on the experimental side, while your interest in grammar seems more traditional. Would you ever call yourself a traditionalist?
GL: I think it helps somehow if prose that on the surface might seem vivid in its disrupture or overthrowal of the conventional is ultimately discovered to be pure grammatical fussbudgetry underneath. (A friend tells me I'm a Victorian at heart.) I probably would not have had a long-enduring, even morbid fascination with prescriptive grammar and punctuation if I weren't convinced that exactitude in such matters was a lost cause.
[ . . . ]
GL: . . . A few years ago, trying to recover from a traumatic breakup, I made a study of hyphenation patterns in the New Yorker magazine back when William Shawn was in charge. I made the hyphen my lifeline, and I put my trust in William Shawn and his grammar genius, Eleanor Gould Packard. . . . I eventually fell in love with somebody else and slept deeply for a while.
Two more, unhooked from the questions that prompted them:
As for fiction versus poetry, the border between the two seems less secure than ever. A lot of writing passes back and forth without anyone summoning the authorities. Some people have told me that what I write is poetry, that it could be laid out as such. But I am a sucker for the old notions of poetry and would never think of my paragraphic jitter in that light. Besides, regarding my stuff as prose is a much more cost-efficient use of paper. The reader gets a full page.[ . . . ]
Another way of looking at this, maybe, is that the motions of even the most centrifugally active mind or heart have a circumference, and the writer of a story s hould probably respect or even celebrate the fixity of the circumference. But within those limits, anything should be welcome to clamor on behalf of itself or rise to an occasion or veer off into ultimately pertinent digression.
Elsewhere online, Lutz has reviewed the new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, for Slate; been interviewed by The Stranger; and has been appreciated, by Lawrence La Riviere White, on TheValve.org.