A summary wouldn't do this collection of varieties of domestic disturbance any justice, and of course a parody, as tempting as that might be, would be impossible to do right. To read Lutz is to enter an unfamiliar world tinged uncomfortably with the real. Or more prosaically, the other way around: a real world that's just… off. Kinked, somehow.

How Lutz has his way with language: not by twisting the sentences by force, or taking them apart to see how they work. They're not sentences where clauses flow to other clauses and end up as grand capillary assemblies of logic, as in a Javier Marias novel. Lutz's sentences are plain in structure, perhaps deliberately unpoetic in diction, but demand the rereading associated with poetry, so one can savor the unfamiliar syllables.

One might for instance, focus on the adverbs. Writers are instructed to use adverbs sparingly, but Lutz squeezes them in; you can almost imagine the satisfying pop they make as they slide into the sentences. Here the adverbs are splayed out more conspicuously for consumption.

Lutz conjures similar magic on the level of the sentence, or clause, even. Cliches when you least expect it. Gerunds baked from thin air. Participial phrases that wait for subjects and are found wanting. There's a faint oily undercurrent of humor running through it all, but none of it is found in, for instance, puns. Nothing so immediately obvious. The unsettling quality of the reader's amusement lies in the juxtapositions: of situations with characters, of adjectives with nouns.

His fiction is drawn from two wells: a more mannered, experimental style of writing with a twist of absurdist fiction. The surrealism comes from the situations that arise from the most ordinary settings: offices, bedrooms, convenience stores, apartments. Lutz employs the vocabularies of the same, of the routines of work, but in conjunction with bodies, familial relations. Bodies, especially, with talk of undernesses and perpendicularities. Unlike in airport thrillers, where the reader races ahead, skimming details, one is forced to slow down the rhythm when reading Lutz, to keep an eye out for the lane changes. ( )

from DEVOTIONS:

"My first wife, my blood wife, had no background to speak of, no relations, customs, scenery. She arrived sharp-spined and already summed up. We ate out all them time and spoke lengthily, vocabularily, about whatever got set before us, especially the meat, with its dragged-out under-song of lifelong life. There was no end to the occasions on which the woman and I got along in public and in private. I remember a smell she had on just her arms, an endearment, something that she been born with or that had traveled a great distance to land on her."

from RECESSIONAL

"I imagined that they had started out as tidy, exact quotients of their mother and their father (an amply brainsick, runaway refrigerationist named Sandy) and the things the two parents said at the table--the household slang they had evolved for borborygmic high jinks and the like."


from CONTRACTIONS

"My husband's piss drippled out day and night, slavering through his underwear, blurring the crotch of every pair with a corona of orangey yellow. He had an enlarged prostate, and he kept a plastic ice-cream tub beside the nightstand. Every five minutes or so until he fell asleep, I would hear him, sodden and unfaucetable, bowing and curbing himself along the edge of the mattress, the tub in one hand, the other jigging his penis against the inner rim until a driblet or two finally plipped surrenderingly against the plastic. Sometimes, after he had resettled himself in his zone of the bed, I would reach across and pat his slobbering penis. My hand would come away clammy, vinegared."

How Lutz uses the silly, 3D words (drippled, unfaucetable, jigging, plipped) without tripping up the text is great. I know this isn't much of a review, but I'll just leave it at this: STORIES IN THE WORST WAY was really fun and moving. ( )

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. ( )

Ax(e)minster and other inconsequentialities. ( )