Burlesques Of Togetherness: Review of Assisted Living by Gary Lutz — Jason Lucarelli

So, summarize Lutz? Put forth tweet-worthy versions of the four stories in Assisted Living? Nope, no such luck. Experience on your own the sentential event for which Lutz has become known. —Jason Lucarelli

Assisted Living
Gary Lutz
Future Tense Books, 2017
32 pages, $5.00

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People really make a fuss over Gary Lutz. Google his name. Read through the results. Read Justin Taylor’s interview at Bookslut, Derek White’s interview at BOMB, Kevin Sampsell’s mini interview at The Rumpus. Read one or two positive and critical Amazon reviews (do the same at Goodreads too). Maybe appreciate a more astute, more literary review (here’s one, two). In reading you might find, panned or loved, Lutz produces no subtle response in anyone. But Lutz is anything but subtle. His every story seems like a dare.

Sample the stuff: “She was the glummer of the two of us, more out of sorts with herself and the harangue of our heartbeats. She bulled into her sleep and came out of it with unperfected follies of feeling.”

These sentences from Vasovagal would wind up piecemeal in the stories inside Assisted Living, Lutz’s chapbook of new fiction out now from Future Tense Press. It’s his fifth collection of stories and his second for Future Tense editor and publisher Kevin Sampsell, who also published Partial List of People to Bleach as a chapbook at 56 pages. Assisted Living amounts to a mere 36 pages, yet the four stories inside are as fractured and syntactically textured as anything in previous collections (Stories in the Worst Way (1996), I Looked Alive (2003), Partial List of People to Bleach (2007), and divorcer (2011). These stories are less stories and more “concentrations of verbal matter.” Each highly wrought instance of inked language showcase a sick obsession with the sentence. His commitment to the form has been admired by authors from Amy Hempel to George Saunders. Ben Marcus has called Lutz “a sentence writer from another planet, deploying language with unmatched invention,” and Diane Williams has said, “His authentic language conquers any habit of speech.” In his own words, Lutz says readers encounter in his stories “instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself.” He says, “To me, language is matter—it’s a substance to be fingered and disturbed… I like to see what happens.”

Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania and currently residing in Pittsburgh, Gary Lutz is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. He was the visiting writer at Syracuse University in the spring of 2003 and at the University of Kansas in the spring of 2007. In 2008, he delivered a pivotal lecture to Columbia University students titled “The Sentence Is A Lonely Place,” which was published by The Believer in 2009. In this instructive essay on the act of sentence-making, Lutz describes the kind sentences he wants to write: “the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself.” Such sentences have “the force and feel of a climax,” and the “acoustical elegance of the aphorism,” where each word bears “physical and sonic resemblance to each other.” The essay introduces specimen sentences through the context of a set of poetics Lutz learned from his teacher Gordon Lish. These poetics involve a handful of maneuvers, one of which is called “consecution…a recursive procedure by which one word pursues itself into its successor by discharging something from deep within itself into what follows.” In a sequel of sorts, “The Poetry of the Paragraph: Some Notes,” appearing in 3:AM Magazine, Lutz discusses the “acoustical symmetry” and “verbal pressure” achievable by certain successions of sentences inside paragraphs. The essay looked at how paragraphs emerge from sentences by means of another maneuver Lutz learned from Lish called “the swerve.” The process of moving from sentence to sentence is “not one of addition or accretion but instead a revisionary process” so that each “new sentence breaks away from, or reconstitutes, its predecessor.” Such a paragraph resembles a “sequence of declarations, each of which is crying out for eternal visibility and audibility, and seeking preeminence.” Instead of “building to a climax,” this kind of paragraph “delivers a series of climaxes.”

While these essays reveal a few of Lish’s important workshop teachings, they also help to make sense of Lutz’s unique method of composition. Because the truest satisfaction from reading Lutz comes from considering how the text was made, these essays—like essays by Stein, Sarraute, or Robbe-Grillet—may be used by readers to read the work against and examine the merits of of the text. His sentences, their “forms and contours,” their “organizations of sound,” are so strange they should be studied for their selection.

So, summarize Lutz? Put forth tweet-worthy versions of the four stories in Assisted Living? Nope, no such luck. Experience on your own the sentential event for which Lutz has become known. Here is the title story’s opening paragraph:

Whether she came on to me or just came at me testily, without much sleep to her name, should make no bit of difference to anybody now. I tried to be a father to her, and she wanted to try being a daughter—that was to be the understanding, effective whenever.

The first sentence is held together by an “intra-sentence intimacy,” the “physical and sonic resemblance” of its words: the assonantal relations between “came” (2x), “name,” and “make”; and “me” (2x), “testily,” and “sleep.” (Note the musical flourish of “testily” before the prepositional phrase.) As for the content of the sentence, conflict is created between the story’s supposed characters of “she” and “me” in the first fifteen beats. Readers wonder what the nature of the relationship is between these characters. The verbal pressure of consonants in “no bit of difference to anybody now” emphasizes this conflict. The second sentence attempts to add context to the relationship (“I tried to be a father to her, and she wanted to try being a daughter”), but the infinitive of “to be” reaches meaningfully, distancing the “I” of the sentence from “father,” while “wanted to try” similarly implies a failure to subscribe to these rules of engagement: a kind of paternal relationship. The phrase post em dash (“that was to be the understanding, effective whenever”) reinforces halfhearted resolve. (Note the verbal symmetry of syllables and shared e’s in “effective whenever.”) In each sentence, the drama of content, the “subject matter” of these sentences—the relationship between the narrator and the girl—“is supplemented or deepened by the drama of the letters within the words.” These sentences contain what Stanley Fish calls “an angle of lean” and create motion by promising “content in prospect.” Lutz reveals content on one hand while concealing it with the other.

Instead of examining the relationship, in a kind of swerve, the next few sentences hover over the girl herself (“she was already sinking in a life of mild peril, of shortages sought out”). Sentences and paragraphs bat back and forth the content of their lives and the content of their relationship, the context of which is indeterminable. The narrator riffs about the girl’s siblings, her mother, the shape of the girl’s hair (“sketched onto the skull, then scumbled”), and her two jobs. Sentences centering on the narrator and the girl tend to point both backward and forward in the story: “She wanted to report to me. That was my importance to her,” or “There wasn’t enough testing of affections on each other.” These kinds of sentences may be deciphered over and over without getting any closer to conclusive certainty. In a Gary Lutz story, acoustics and ambiguity are dramatized at every turn.

At one point Lutz launches a “scene” from a turn of phrase: “Everything, I repeat, was on the level. It was so level we could set things out on it, the whole of whatever it was, with its jumpiness and discomposures, without anything of hers ever having to touch anything of mine.” The stickiness of their relationship, their situation, is simply implied. Yet the story seems to reach a climax when the narrator bumps into the girl after not seeing her for some time:

Nine, ten months later, I bumped into her at a bus terminal. Or maybe it was at a car service. She was wearing old-looking clothes that were new to me. She had a handbag—a first. She was applying to veterinary schools, she said. (We shook hands over it.) I said that at my age, you start to realize you might have loved only once, if that. This came out sounding newsy and impatient.

She said, “It’s been years.”

The semantic character of earlier sentences is evident, but here the narrator actually reveals himself through actions and language. The handshake resembles a fatherly gesture. The sentence right after undermines the handshake by putting forth thoughts on love. The narrator’s implied speech seems to rush forth (a humdrum phrase might be built with “blurt,” but here Lutz chooses “newsy and impatient”). Heartbreaking is the girl’s response, if you fuss with it, and you must because meaning-making is up to you. Has it been years since she loved only once? This is as funny as it is sad. Her phrase widens the gap that has been there from the beginning. She shows her age, her lack of experience. The narrator’s hurts turn out to be worse than hers.

While sometimes the lengths Lutz goes to when manipulating and arranging language in such cryptic chronicles are comical, it pays to seriously wonder where his language comes from. When all else fails, it’s this wonder that keeps you pinned to the page.

Each subsequent story in Assisted Living conveys a similarly disjointed “motion of moments” within collapsing marriages and fragmenting relationships. These are stories of lonely, sexually ambivalent characters never “lacking for a loss” interacting depressedly in the “physical hooey” that goes with being human. In “You Are Logged In As Marie,” the narrator describes his marriage to an ex-wife, “an ex if ex, just this once, is allowably abbreviative of expeller, or excluder, or exiler—take your pick,” and dolls out a line through which the entire collection might be viewed: “To wit: Wherever there are two people, people even anything like us, one is forever the casualty of the other.” In “This Is Not A Bill,” the narrator confronts the truth of “I was either a bad reflection on my parents or their one true likeness” by looking at his own children. But, by the end of the narrative, he doesn’t seem to get anywhere, and the final sentence responds to the very first: “I go into a day saying, “I won’t let myself know.”’ In “Nothing Clarion Came Of Her, Either,” a woman comes between two married women in an account of “an open marriage, leaking from both ends.” The narrative concludes with an epiphany (“when it finally just comes to you”) about the wife and their relationship, though this epiphany occurs, in effect, off the page.

Once, in an interview with David Winters, when asked where his writing fits into his life, Lutz replied, “My writing isn’t a career or a craft or a hobby or anything like that. It is more like a tiny annex to my life, a little crawl space in which I occasionally end up by accident in the dark.” That statement makes Assisted Living seem like a surprise, even mirage-like. Yet these stories are strikingly real, demand devotional attention, and make reading anything in their aftermath seem a little light, a little less the show.

—Jason Lucarelli

Jason Lucarelli is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Numéro Cinq, The Literarian, 3:AM Magazine, Litro, Squawk Back, and NANO Fiction.

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