Gary Lutz
If currently there is a writer whose work does represent the cutting edge in advancing the art of fiction beyond prevailing conventions and stale assumptions, in my view that writer is Gary Lutz. Lutz’s short stories indeed question the presumption that the inherent goals of fiction are to tell stories and communicate “themes” by establishing instead that the core element of fiction is the sentence and that the art of fiction consists of the resourceful accumulation of sentences—in Lutz’s case the accumulation of singular, surprising, and painstakingly constructed sentences. These innovative sentences in turn give rise to the larger discursive and aesthetic order that can indeed be found in Lutz’s stories, but Lutz first attends to the aesthetic integrity of his fiction at this more fundamental level, such that “content” and “form” become inextricable.
Lutz has himself described the method by which he builds his sentences in some detail, most notably in the essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” but also in numerous interviews he has given over the years since Stories in the Worst Way, his first book, was published in 1996. Most of his stories, he explains, are conceived as sentences, or the gradual development of sentences, without relation to character or a plot. He describes his interest as being almost exclusively in placing these sentences together in the most resonant way he can devise, resonant literally in how words reinforce and echo one another and how the sonic and grammatical relationship between those sentences maintains and magnifies such echoes. Assonance, consonance, and alliteration play an important role in this process, as does manipulations of grammar, odd juxtapositions, unusual word choice, word combinations and neologisms. We don’t have to get very far into the first story in Divorcer, the title story, to find a passage that immediately illustrates many of the typical features of Lutz’s prose:
The afternoon welcomed me into its swelters. An hour went by, then cleared the way for another. I had found a bench near the store and stood in quiet beside it. Others came and sat: unfinished-looking men, a pair of proudly ungabby girls I took for lovers done for now with their love, a woman graphically sad in ambitious pinpoints of jewelry. Then a man so moodless, I could see all the different grades and genres of zilch behind his eyes. The city flattered these people who in the country would have been flattened fast for all to see all the same.
The reader is immediately invited to pause and consider the first sentence as a self-contained linguistic unit. Why this unorthodox figure—“welcomed me into its swelters”—with its verb made into a noun? The second sentence also draws attention to itself, this time through the strange and arresting use of personification, reinforcing the conclusion that Lutz wants us focused in at the sentence level. Indeed, to fully appreciate Lutz’s singular sentences, we must be willing to restrain the impulse regard them as links in a discursive chain, to in effect merge them into a kind of verbal stream that carries us headlong not only from sentence to sentence, but through all the story’s verbal formulations and devices, regarding them all as simply the transparent means to the ultimate goal of narrative development and resolution. In a Gary Lutz story we must on the contrary pause to contemplate what “unfinished-looking men” might actually look like, to judge the fitness of the phrases “proudly ungabby girls” and “a man so moodless” in leaving an impression of these briefly mentioned figures. We must note not simply the wordplay of “flattered” and flattened” but also that each word separately produces its own distinct connotations, while in this syntactical pairing the two also work together to give the whole passage additional meaning uniting the particular details, as does the following repetition of “for all to see all the same.”
For readers willing to accept Lutz’s redirection of our aesthetic interest, it is perhaps tempting to conclude that Lutz’s art is indeed an art of the sentence, considered in isolation from narrative, character, or setting. Thus almost all reviewers and interviewers who express admiration for his fiction concentrate their attention on Lutz as a unique stylist, ignoring the way his stories do in fact retain these other elements. The formal patterns that emerge are both a result of and a natural aesthetic complement to the singular sentences that constitute his work. If individual sentences in a sense leave us suspended in their word twists and serpentine syntax, the stories in which they appear do something similar, accumulating these sentences to create a kind of layering effect that gradually expands our sense of character and situation without making them secondary, mere vehicles for advancing a conventionally developed plot. The stories work by linking sentences to paragraphs to episodes, establishing a relationship of mutual resonance and reinforcement, creating from character and situation an impression of depth and breadth that might seem static, but that finally works as an aesthetically coherent alternative to the notion that “story” entails movement forward.
“Divorcer” introduces us not only to this alternative strategy, but also to the theme that pervades the work and allows Lutz to expand his technique beyond the bounds of what would be possible in an individual story. Like all of the other pieces in Divorcer, it is composed of marked fragments, each one adding a layer to the narrator’s account of his short-lived marriage. The sections move freely around the narrator’s recollections of the marriage, each of them capturing a moment or arriving at an insight that illuminates the circumstances of the marriage and its ultimate failure, but by no means suggesting that human relationships can be explained by representing them in a “story.” As one would suspect, the reality of failed marriage is most memorably evoked in the most bracing sentences:
Marriage had not worked out to be a doubling of each other’s life, though there were duplicate juicers and sources of music.
My penis might have had reach, maybe, but it never increased itself for her.
My wife: she was the active one in the marriage, mixing other men into it.
Both through sentences like these and through a formal arrangement that reproduces for the story as a whole the poetic suspension in which such sentences are designed to hold the reader, “Divorcer” allows us, in effect, to inhabit the experience of divorce rather than simply read about it.
The other stories in the book expand and enhance this effect, approaching the experience from different angles, augmenting it through depth of treatment, their characters compelling precisely because they seem to blend into each other, their shared predicament conveying a powerful sense of pain, confusion, and loss, as well as, frequently enough, self-hatred. In “The Driving Dress,” the narrator loses weight in order to begin wearing the clothes left behind by his ex-wife, coming to terms with his (second) divorce by fleeing his own identity. In “Fathering” and “Middleton,” no actual divorce is involved, but each introduces us to a marriage at a point when its failure is implicit. In the former, a father focuses his attention on helping his daughter through school, after which his job as a father will be mostly done. Meanwhile, he arranges trysts with other men for his wife, as if acknowledging that the marriage itself is now past its usefulness. In the latter, a husband’s wife has died, and as the husband briefly relates to us the events of the funeral, it becomes clear the marriage had become perfunctory: “There had in fact been talk of divorce, but we talked about it the way other people talked about getting a pool or maybe just a pool table, even just the miniature kind that rests atop a regular table, even a card table.” That the marriage was inadequate to the husband’s needs is confirmed when shortly after the funeral he begins a sexual relationship with a man.
Two additional stories, “To Whom Might I Have Concerned?” and “I Have to Be Halved,” widen the focus to include same-sex relationships as well, although they are portrayed as just as subject to disillusionment and dysfunction as their heterosexual counterparts. Thus sexuality in Divorcer is not shown to make a significant difference in tempering the fragility of intimate human relationships. All human beings are prone to the same blindness, indifference, and casual cruelty, all human love accompanied by an expiration date. As the narrator of “Womanesque” explains his failures, “It’s just that I was born, grew some, started differing, didn’t stop.”
These are certainly not original insights. What is original in Gary Lutz’s fiction is the especially powerful way in which these insights are expressed, emotionally affecting without resorting to traditional narrative devices. He does not narrow the possibilities of “literary” language to the usual sort of figurative flourishes that too often serve mostly as linguistic decoration, nor does he rely on typical notions of plot or of “well-rounded” characters or any of the other established elements of fiction that draw attention away from language. If much experimental fiction is primarily experiment with form, Lutz’s innovation is in paring back form in order to reconceive the purpose of the sentence as the truly essential element of prose fiction. In the way they reinvigorate the English sentence, Lutz’s stories in Divorcer ought to inspire other writers to consider how close attention to the shapes and sonorities of sentences can in turn bring a satisfyingly new kind of organization to fiction.
Diane Williams
A current writer whose work in its sensitivity to the syntactic and auditory intricacies of the sentence can invite comparison with Gary Lutz is Diane Williams. Williams works primarily in what is usually categorized as “flash fiction,” as did Lutz early in his career, but in his later work he has combined a focus on the sentence as center of interest with a fuller exploration of character and narrative. In doing so Lutz may have sacrificed some of the nonlinear purity and hallucinatory intensity found in Williams’s fiction, and her stories are also more highly wrought, with a greater focus on the possibilities of the form as a means of foregrounding language itself, than most flash fiction has become. They do not settle for snapshot realism, and, despite their length, they in fact encourage slower, more careful reading. If flash fiction potentially appeals to a new, attenuated attention span among some readers, Diane Williams’s stories reward expanded attention and encourage rereading. One could spend as much time lingering over her brief fictions as reading much longer stories by more conventional writers, too many of which require too little of the reader’s close attention.
“My Defects,” the first story in Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, might serve not just as an introduction to this book but also to Williams’s work as a whole:
I’m happy at least to do without a sexual relation and I have this fabulous reputation and how did I get that in the first place? I am proud enough of this reputation and it stands to reason there’s a lot that’s secret that I don’t tell anyone.
I want to end this at the flabber, although I am flabbergasted.
I opened the cupboard, where the treats are stored, and helped myself and made a big mess, by the lakeshore, of the food, of the rest of my life, eventually.
Michelle, the doctor’s nurse, showed me a photograph of her cats. The smart cat opens the cupboard, Michelle says, where the treats are stored, and she can help herself, and she makes a big mess!
I crossed the street to survey the lake and I heard crepitations–three little girls bouncing their ball. I used to see them in perspective–my children–young people, one clearly unsuitable. She can’t help herself–she makes a big mess.
With my insight and skill–what do I search for at the shore?–the repose of the lake But sadly, although it does have a dreamy look, it is so prone to covering familiar ground.
On first encountering Diane Williams’s fiction, readers are likely to puzzle over the classification of such a condensed and often enigmatic work (“My Defects” is quoted here in full, and it is typical Williams in its length) as a short story. Short, yes, but story? Prose poem, maybe? Prose fragment? Surreal reverie? Williams’s stories have characters, but they hardly “develop” in any conventionally recognizable way. Sometimes a story seems to be advancing a plot only to abandon it or veer off in an apparently new direction. Most of the stories are too brief to evoke many details of setting, and while Williams does return to particular themes– especially sex–the stories are generally too elusive for the reader to conclude they are attempting to “say something.”
In “My Defects,” we are introduced to a character whose identity seems continuous enough but who is never really developed beyond her initial assertion that “I am happy at least to do without a sexual relation” and her accompanying puzzlement that “I have this fabulous reputation and how did I get that in the first place?” It could be said that the story is essentially an illustration of the narrator’s declaration of her circumstances in the first paragraph. To adequately discern the nature of the story’s portrayal of the narrator’s situation, however, we must understand the extent to which her initial words are both completely truthful and disingenuous. She doesn’t tell us why she is without a sexual relationship or why she is happy about this, nor what precisely her “reputation” is. (Perhaps she speaks for the author, who certainly does have a “fabulous reputation” among her admirers?) Yet at the same time, the narrator expresses in the first paragraph what surely does seem to her a literally accurate account of her life’s circumstances, however elliptical the reader might find it.
In a sense, the narrator tries to clarify what she means by this initial statement in the following paragraphs, which at least appear to present a semblance of plot and action. As is usual in a Williams story, the transition is abrupt, the connection at first obscure, facilitated only by some characteristic Williams wordplay. We might all along think that the narrator is speaking from her kitchen, except for the abrupt shift to the doctor’s office, which suggests that these scene changes may just be arbitrary. However, the parallel invocation of “a big mess” encourage us to find continuity after all, naturally enough inviting us to wonder what the mess might be. (Are all references to the “mess” just versions of the narrator’s?)
That the next paragraph finds the narrator watching children at the lake, imagining her children, “one clearly unsuitable,” along with a general air of regret perhaps unavoidably leads us to suspect that the narrator’s visit to the doctor might have been to seek an abortion, although the visit could be simply an implication that she is pregnant. The syntax and transitions are opaque enough that perhaps neither of these scenarios apply, however, and we are probably best advised not to try pinning down the story to its particulars at all. The unanswerable questions persist in the final paragraph. Is the narrator being ironic or sarcastic in referring to her “insight” and “skill,” since she ultimately gives us little reason to think she believes herself to possess much of either? Does the “dreamy look” of the lake coincide with the “repose” she seeks there, and wouldn’t “familiar ground” actually contribute to repose? And we should again be attentive to the wordplay: a lake by its nature covers unfamiliar ground, although it could also be just a continuation of the ground the narrator currently finds frustratingly familiar.
A story like “My Defects” seems designed–and both its radical compression and its oblique structural devices certainly appear to be products of design–to unavoidably provoke the reader into looking for coherence and continuity while also frustrating any attempts to collapse the story into a too-facile coherence or to find continuity too readily. Like many of Diane Williams’s stories, it suspends the reader in its own dreamlike shifts and playful language such that the most satisfying response may be to relax the demand that the story yield up its meaning immediately, to perhaps be willing to tolerate indeterminacy. This would not really mean conceding the story is meaningless, a conclusion reached by too many readers when encountering “difficult” fiction, but rather accepting that its meaning (even at the level of “following” the plot) is suggestive rather than certain, including even the possibility of overlapping, multiple meanings.
Not all of Williams’s stories are as compressed as “My Defects” (although some are even briefer and more compressed). The title story provides a character study of sorts of Vicky Swanky, who, “years ago,” was a beauty. Now, “her breasts were flat. Her hips were flat. She looked older than her forty years.” The first part of the story offers a reasonably cohesive portrait of Vicky Swanky, whom the male narrator announces as an “old friend” who is “going through a divorce” and who invites the narrator over to her house. What the two do together is suggested in typical Williams ambiguity: “In connection with sex, we lightened up a little then and we dumped some of it off the edge at a minimum.” The second half of the story introduces elements that seem to develop the situation: the narrator brings over a dog; it snows; Vicky Swanky serves food. The narrator expresses his own uncertainties about the situation: “It was getting busy concerning the basic meaning, the degree, and the quality.” In the story’s final paragraph, a plumber arrives and indicates that he will need “to remove everything from the nipple in the wall to the toilet.”
“Vicky Swanky,” although still very short, is nevertheless characteristic of Williams’s more extended fictions. Such stories appear to progress by accumulating incidents, but these incidents lead the reader on paths that inexorably wander in uncharted directions, sometimes changing tack altogether. This is especially true in the novellas Williams has written, such as On Sexual Strength and Romance Erector. In these longest stories, something like a narrative does develop, but the reader should not expect its episodes to be related through their logical coherence, even if they do unfold in what seems a kind of progression. The narrative is built up out of the same sort of accumulation of smaller units of exposition and “action” we find in the briefer fictions, but if anything the effect over the course of the story is even more digressive than in the flash fictions, as the narrative oddities have more space in which to proliferate.
Thus Romance Erector tells the kind of story, about love and sex, the confusions in the former caused by the latter, one would expect from the title, but while it does feature recognizable characters experiencing those confusions, their actions are sufficiently ambiguous, at times almost arbitrary, that the reader might share their confusions. But the practiced reader of Williams’s signature short pieces will surely note the metafictional implications of the narrator’s words in Chapter 7, which opens with the narrator telling us “The real story begins on Thursday—pungent, warming—the translucent tale.” At the end she admits, however, that “I have storyish ideas but no story in me. This is the row of empty marks. These are the signs of what is next.” This of course applies to all of Diane Williams’s fictions—they embody “storyish ideas” but relate stories only in the sense that things seem to happen, even if we don’t quite know how or why.
In both her longest and shortest fictions, Williams fashions a kind of “story” that proceeds entirely from the “empty marks”—words—that are made into the “signs” that determine “what is next,” the sentences that in the intricate process of their unfolding work to shape narrative and character development. The result is indeed “translucent” prose compositions with enough of the familiar features of a “tale” to be recognized as a story but also cloaked in enough shadow and distortion as to remain mysterious.
Dawn Raffel
Dawn Raffel is now probably best known for her 2012 book, The Secret Life of Objects, an unorthodox memoir in which the author invokes her past through reflections prompted by various objects she still possesses. While this book succeeds on its own terms, offering a concise but affecting account of the writer's relationships with family and friends, it would be an injustice if its relative success came to overshadow the accomplishments of her fiction, which are numerous and distinctive.
If Raffel's fiction is in danger of being overlooked, this admittedly might be due to its rather infrequent appearance. Her first book, the story collection In the Year of Long Division, came out in 1995, her first novel, Carrying the Body, was published in 2002, while a second collection of stories, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, appeared in 2010. The long intervals between books apparently comes not from wavering ambition but an overabundance of care, as Raffel has spoken in interviews of taking up to a year on one of her stories, most of which are seldom more than a half-dozen pages long.
Although Raffel is a former student of Gordon Lish, and thus could loosely be grouped among those current writers influenced by his notion of "consecution" (writers such as Gary Lutz and Christine Schutt), the care that she takes is as much with the intervals and silences between sentences as it is in the construction and linking of sentences, the strategies for which have been adopted by most of Lish's acolytes. Certainly Raffel takes pains over the rhythms and tonalities of her sentences, as we can plainly see in the very first story of In the Year of Long Division:
Fishing was the only sport in our town. How it was. Pick. Any house in our town was any house in our town. Any wind in our town was the wind in our town. Down was down. Queasy was a way of life. Bored to crackers, snap, kerplunk. ("We Were Our Age")
If some readers might find Raffel's prose "difficult," its difficulty arises first of all from primacy of sound over sense. The stop-and-start rhythm, the strategic repetition, the assonance modifying into outright rhyme (our-house-town-down)--these are the most immediate qualities of a passage such as this, and whatever narrative or descriptive work they also do must accommodate itself to the intonations of Raffel's language. That language does indeed perform this other work, however, in its own unorthodox but ultimately compelling way. "Any house in our town was any house in our town" tells us almost all we need to know about this town, making any further sensory description superfluous. "Down was down," in addition to providing Raffel's signature wordplay, also clues us in on the type of wind pervading the town, the kind ensuring that "Queasy was a way of life."
But Raffel's attention to the lacunae between and among these sentences, to what needn't or perhaps even can't be said, is just as painstaking. So ruthless is she in eliminating the unnecessary, in fact, trusting in the reader to bridge the gaps and to acknowledge the unstated, that some readers might feel disoriented from the lack of expository directions and situational detail. This feature of Raffel's fiction is perhaps what has encouraged the view that it is a version of "minimalism" (for example, in John Domini's review of Restless Universe reprinted in his book The Sea-God's Herb), but while Raffel's work does to some extent recall the similarly reduced fictions of Mary Robison, her stories rely even less on narrative than most minimalist fiction, in which conventional "drama" is often missing but things happen nevertheless. Raffel's stories convey something closer to a literary impressionism, a blurry but distinguishable evocation of a scene or episode, often, as in "We Were Our Age," an exercise in memory more than storytelling.
A more conventionally recognizable feature of Raffel's fiction is her extensive use of dialogue, which is in fact the dominant mode in some stories. (Perhaps reflecting the influence of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, whom Raffel has identified as among her earliest inspirations.) One of the stories in Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, "The Myth of Drowning," is entirely a dialogue set-piece, and its development is typical, as a man and a woman before sleep talk about a story the woman had told:
"How was it that she drowned?"
"Who knows," she said. "She couldn't swim. Or cramps. Maybe undertow. The undertow was wicked"
"You know what I mean."
"No, what do you mean?"
"I mean people were there," he said. "That's how you told it. A crowd on the shore."
"That's what the myth is: Drowning is noisy. It isn't," she said.
"It isn't," she said.
"I heard you the first time."
"Tired, I said."
"Broad daylight," he said.
"And shallow," he said. "No one could see her?"
Although by the end of this brief exchange (around two pages long) we can piece together what must be the context of the conversation (the couple have had a tense evening, the man believes the woman sees herself as the drowning woman), the absence of authorial assistance is made even more acute by the abbreviated, discontinuous nature of the dialogue itself. But that comes not from a distortion of human speech patterns but an affirmation of it, an attempt to capture the way we actually talk to each other with fidelity. As David Winters says of Raffel's dialogue, "This is speech as it is spoken in life, not in literature: shorn of explanatory apparatus, driven more by conflicting agendas than by semantics, and, in its resultant asymmetry, rife with abrupt about-faces and non sequiturs."
Consistent with the strategies of her prose style more generally, Raffel's dialogue calls on the reader's capacity to infer the not-said from the said, the encompassing context from the fleeting clues we do get. In asking us to read closely and carefully, she also suggests that reading fiction is not merely the registering of the words on the page but also remaining alert to their subtler intimations, the discursive and aesthetic reverberations created by the tension between what those words signify and what they leave unexpressed. The reader's experience will be incomplete without this sort of attentiveness, but this doesn't make her work truly difficult or inaccessible. Only readers who close themselves off to the possibility of a more expansive reading experience, expansive in the sense that reading is more than gliding along the surface of words but can be provisional and recursive, will find Raffel's fiction perplexing. Patient readers will find it enlivening.
It might seem that Raffel's aesthetic strategy would work best in short fiction (and some of her stories are short enough to be called "flash fiction"), but her only novel, Carrying the Body, is also quite good as well. It shares with Raffel's stories a focus on family relations, although where many of the stories focus on relationships between parents and children, Carrying the Body portrays family drama more broadly, beginning with a pair of estranged sisters, one of whom left home young to experience life more fully, while the older sister remained in the home to care for their debilitated father. The younger sister returns to the home with her young son and eventually leaves again, abandoning the child, who becomes increasingly ill, to the ministrations of the older sister, a job for which she is clearly not prepared. The novel traces the development of the relationship between the older sister (referred to throughout as "the aunt") and the child, using the same elliptical methods as in the stories, which prove to work very well in evoking the hesitant, tentative growth of the aunt's concern for the child, as well as her increasing desperation about her own inadequacy in dealing with the situation she finds herself confronting.
Further Adventures in the Restless Universe (2010) is the most recent fiction (in book form) Raffel has published, and while the stories in this collection are generally similar in approach to those in her first book, a few of them, such as "The Air and Its Relatives," although still fragmented and conducted largely in dialogue, are arguably somewhat more conventional. The focus is even more resolutely on parent-children relationships. "The Air and Its Relatives" is a memory story about the narrator and her father, framed by a series of scenes in which the father is teaching the daughter how to drive. The fragmentation of the story serves to emphasize the episodic quality of memory, so that the story coheres in a readily perceptible way. The story's elegiac tone is consistent with many of the other stories in the book as well, and the book is further unified by a motif provided by the book's title, itself a reference to Max Born's The Restless Universe, which is explicitly identified in "The Air and Its Relatives" as a book the daughter and the father would read aloud together. We live in a "restless" universe of change and ineffable mystery, not least in the human experience of love and loss this book explores.
Further Adventures in The Restless Universe begins with an epigraph from Born that not only applies to this book but could also serve metaphorically as an apt description of Raffel's fiction as a whole: "Visible light covers only about one octave, speaking in musical terms." It is certainly appropriate to think of Raffel's work "in musical terms," even if it is a music, like that of, say, John Cage or Morton Feldman, that keenly exploits absence and quiet as part of its musical scheme. And if visible light is only one part of the spectrum, and not the largest, so too does Raffel's fiction make explicitly visible only a sampling of the world in which its characters act, talk, and subsist. With the reader's help, it manages to strongly illuminate, nonetheless.
Noy Holland
Although the influence of Gordon Lish as editor and teacher has extended to a wide range of seemingly disparate writers, one group seems to be especially sensitive to Lish’s influence. Writers such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and Noy Holland palpably employ, in somewhat different but observable ways, the strategy Lish calls “consecution,” the focus on constructing and linking sentences by considering sound and rhythm as well as sense. Indeed, these writers no doubt take the strategy farther than Lish himself even envisioned, at least in their intensive focus on the sonic qualities of language, resulting in short stories (all but Schutt work almost exclusively in the short story, but her best work may also be her short fiction) using an alternative mode of composition through which “character” and “story” are not abandoned but emerge as the afterthought of the movement of language, the characters and plots subordinated to the autonomy of that movement.
From this shared commitment to more fully exploring the linguistic resources of the sentence as a literary device, each of these writers draws on those resources in their own way, with different stylistic signatures that also create divergent larger-scale formal effects. Although all four writers work in narrative fragments, Williams’s stories are both the most highly compressed and the most elliptical. Her brief fictions especially require very close attention to the materiality of their sentences (including their sound), each one of which might be an episode in itself, the interval between them a leap in time or place. The same is true of Lutz’s early work, although more recently his stories have gotten longer, even if Lutz’s sentences are more notable for their utterly singular wordplay than for advancing clearly discernible plots. Lutz is perhaps the writer among this group who has most assiduously developed the strategy of consecution taken from Lish, while Christine Schutt might be described as the most “lyrical” prose stylist (although her prose is ultimately not so conventional in its carefully cadenced lyricism, which in its way is as sensitive to the intricacies of sound and syntax as Lutz’s more unpredictable sentences). Schutt’s novels in particular come closest to fulfilling traditional expectations of plot and character, but the reader who approaches her fiction simply for its narrative interest and who fails to appreciate what Lutz, in his essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” calls the “page hugging” appeal of Schutt’s writing will surely miss out on a significant element of its achievement and effect.
The stories in Noy Holland’s, Swim for the Little One First, are not as brief as Williams’s pieces, although they do have something of their enigmatic quality; they are not as verbally adventurous as Lutz’s stories, which does not mean they are less scrupulous in their attention to language; they do not develop plot and character as transparently as Schutt’s fiction does, but Holland incorporates linear narrative more than either Williams or Lutz. While such short pieces as “Blood Country” and “The Last Doll Never Opens” could be described as closer to surreal fables (or even prose poems), the most evocative and most compelling of the stories in Swim for the Little One First are the longer ones, generally both more extended in time and more specific to place. In these stories, a cogent narrative generally does emerge, unfolding as well in a recognizable setting, often the American West. However, because they are developed through extremely truncated fragments (sometimes only a single sentence), containing little in the way of direct exposition, the stories can seem impressionistic and elusive. With some, it is only after coming to the end of the story that one realizes Holland’s individually arresting sentences have told us a story after all.
The book’s first story, “Pachysandra,” works in this way. We track the narrator as she returns to her girlhood desert home to care for Rose (presumably her sister, although the relationship remains somewhat oblique). While there, she begins a sexual relationship with Rudy—“the help”—by whom she becomes pregnant, but subsequently she terminates the pregnancy (“I went to the hospital and had them scrape what Rudy gave me out”), even though at the beginning of the story she had been trying to become pregnant with her boyfriend, Tonto. We are not likely to forget this introductory episode, since the narrator’s activity is presented to us in an especially memorable formulation:
Rose called.
I said, “Hello, Rose.”
“You sound funny.”
I was lying on my back with my legs in the air trying to make a baby with my mister. I had his seed in there. My poor egg had stepped out to meet it.
By the end, the narrator has changed her mind about this effort:
I would not have been much of a mother. I went for shitbags. I liked to sleep late. I liked people who could work their own spoon.
While sentences like these do not exhibit the breaks in logic or continuity that frequently make Williams’s sentences so startling, or lead to the radical linguistic transformations that make us stop and linger over Lutz’s, they are surely not submerged into the ordinary flow of expository discourse characterizing most conventional narratives. They indeed ask us to pause and appreciate the way they avoid familiar phrasing and routine idioms in favor of a directness of expression both trenchant (“I liked people who could work their own spoon”) and almost ingenuous (“I had his seed in there”) but that also encompass unorthodox but quite satisfying figurative turns (“My poor egg had stepped out to meet it”). Because it does seem the expected sort of invisible prose has been deliberately avoided, passages such as these can seem odd or eccentric, but upon reflection they are in fact quite precise and evocative, fully coherent, if self-enclosed, in their fidelity to the isolated moments they attempt to invoke.
Since they provide us with more such moments, the longer stories afford us greater opportunity to appreciate what such passages are up to, as well as the way Holland assembles them into narratives in which much of the story occurs in the gaps between these articulated moments but are if anything more powerful because of that. “Luckies Like Us” ultimately relates the story of a family that has suffered devastating misfortune, focusing on the aftermath of an automobile accident that has left a son in a vegetative state. The story alternates between moments centered on the perspectives of the mother (who feels responsible for the accident), the father, and a daughter. The overlapping of perspectives allows us to integrate the characters’ ongoing attempt to cope with their situation with the “backstory” that has produced it, a strategy that, along with Holland’s stark and pointed language, makes what could be a potentially sentimentalized, emotionally facile story resonate through an emotional restraint that is ultimately all the more effective in conveying the family’s desperate plight. Indeed, Holland’s stories do not indulge in easy emotions, even if the bleak emotional atmosphere in many of them can be chilling. The characters face difficult circumstances and often suffer grim fates, but they neither struggle heroically to overcome their difficulties and thus inspire our admiration nor merely succumb to them passively and provoke mere pity. They do what they can, which more than anything else also makes them seem intensely human.
“Merengue” presents a decidedly non-sentimental portrait of a senior citizen community in Florida whose residents once led vital lives, but
Now they went about on tricycles and wheelchairs, the want to drift still in them. The old women played bridge and bickered by day and by nightfall slept with the louvers pinched shut. The old toms howled on the beach at night. The old men fished with kittens.
The area itself has seen better days as well. Once “starlets arrived in gold lame with their hair heaped up on their heads,” but then “the young went elsewhere. The sea ate the beach. Hotels were looted, emptied out but for squatters with their shopping carts and rags.” Two wandering lovers, Jack and Mary, arrive “from the land of head-high corn.” Mary is pregnant, about which Jack is, to say the least, ambivalent. Jack eventually becomes impatient with his new surroundings as well, which seem to him “like a nursing home without nurses,” but Mary is taken up by the old men, on whom she does seem to have a softening effect. Mary is subsequently gang-raped by local teenagers, and not only loses her baby but is told she will no longer be able to have children (her fate inviting a contrast with that of the narrator of “Pachysandra”). The story is the longest in the book, and it shows how Holland’s sentence-based fragments can very effectively expand over a larger canvas, creating an ultimate depth of character and situation that, in this case, makes the story’s somber conclusion affecting without descending into melodrama. “Merengue” has the length of a short story, but some of the scope and density of a novel.
The best story in the book, the title story, has a similar scope and density, although it is about half as long. It is also the most formally interesting work in this collection. At first we are tempted to think the narrator is addressing us in the story’s first few lines:
How nice you could come to visit. See our home, how we live, how the leaves sweep down. The fields green still.
We turned out clocks back. I brought squash in, tossed a sheet across the withering vines. We’re to expect a frost once the wind quits, wind from the north, flurries. A chance.
We’ll move the rabbits in the morning, light the stove. Chicory in your coffee, honey how you like. On the radio the news.
It becomes apparent, however, that the narrator is addressing her father, who has come to live with her. The story continues to be told as a direct address to the father, during which his frayed relations with his family are revealed to us, including a troubled relationship with his only son, the narrator’s brother, which culminated in the son’s suicide. In the compressed time of its telling, as the father is moving in, we nevertheless learn much about the family history and especially about the brother’s suicide, the details of which seem irrepressibly to emerge as the narrator speaks on, showing the father around the house. The family’s life is nicely captured in the story’s final lines:
If there is anything you want — someone will get it for you.
My daughter will. Your wife will, or I will. Somebody always has.
Even as the narrator summons up the past and evokes the present, her words come to us shaped by Holland’s attention to the rhythms her sentences set up both within and among themselves (and to which she clearly pays great attention), as well as to such auditory qualities as alliteration (“Chicory in your coffee, honey how you’d like”) and to rhetorical devices such as repetition. Swim for the Little One First confirms Noy Holland to be a writer who can start with this sensitivity to language and use it to build formally intricate fictions that are also a great pleasure to read.
Julie Reverb
It is not surprising that one of the blurbs for Julie Reverb's debut novel, No Moon (appearing on the publisher's page—Calamari Archive—for the book), is from Gary Lutz. While I do not know if the two writers are acquainted, or if Reverb would explicitly claim Lutz as an influence, certainly her prose can be reminiscent of Lutz's sonically charged, syntactically ingenious sentences:
Ted hammered the priest's mean pulse. He'd cottoned only Billy's beating and the blind eye turning. The priest was a gummy one; the psalms whistled through his gaps in Mass. Nothing but the drone of phoning it in. Jill stayed quiet or didn't know.
The sound effects in this passage are distinct, if lightly applied. The alliteration--"priests. . .pulse," "Billy's beating. . .blind eye"--draws the reader's attention immediately, but pausing to take in more of the paragraph's aural devices reveals the sibilance of sentence three and the internal rhyming of "drone" and "phoning." The syntax is unorthodox--"the blind eye turning"--if not momentarily confounding--"whistled through his gaps in Mass"--but ultimately quite pleasingly evocative: If we're not sure about the "gaps in Mass," surely "the drone of phoning it in" tells us all we need to know about the priest's performance.
Reverb's prose style, which could be described as self-consciously literary (at least in the sense that the author is quite clearly concerned with the sound and structure of her sentences), at first might seem a curious choice for depicting the fictional world of No Moon, which is altogether tawdry and uncultivated. The story, which is told in a sidelong, elliptical way, freely moving between past and present, centers on Lucy, an exotic dancer and prostitute, and Billy, a disabled man who falls in love with Lucy and tries to build a grand burlesque show around her in an old movie theater turned seedy strip club. The effort comes to naught when the gangster-ish club owner finally discovers what Billy is up to and closes down the show as Billy is trying to introduce it on opening night (after Billy has already failed to even find a print shop willing to print his crude poster advertising the event). As the novel concludes, the club is burning and Lucy has suffered a complete mental breakdown.
The meticulous intricacy of No Moon's style has the effect of distancing us from the otherwise abject characters and their degraded milieu, so that we don't really feel we are getting to "know" the characters intimately, in a way that would enhance feelings of sympathy for them (indeed, the effect of the novel's ending is in part determined by our lack of complete knowledge about Lucy). Nor is the shabby environment described with the kind of focus meant to evoke a "gritty" realism in depicting such a marginalized district. The novel doesn't "poeticize" its subject, but it does resist both sentimentality and a mocking irony and instead provides its own kind of authenticity through the aesthetic integrity of the prose, which offers its alternative but cogent representation of the characters' lives as well as the setting in which those lives have been determined.
No Moon is a slim novel, but it is "minimalist" only in size, not in the scope of its portrayal of human experience or the ambition of its writing. The sort of linguistic and syntactical innovation (what Lutz has called the achievement of a "vivid extremity of language") to be found in the fiction of writers like Gary Lutz and Diane Williams, and now pursued by Julie Reverb, allows for a greater compression of form because sentences and paragraphs are themselves more dynamic and provide the amplification we usually expect from fuller development of form and narrative. It will be interesting to see how Reverb further extends the possibilities of this orientation to the art of fiction in her future work.
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