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hahildebrand's review against another edition
4.0
Kind of amazing, but also kind of too much of a good thing. I loved it, but it exhausted me. Might be a while before I delve into his other stuff.
colinreedmoon's review against another edition
5.0
Honest to God, this guy is making the rest of us look like tools; this is one of the most incredible things I've ever read, and I'm sad I can't write anything like him. The best six bucks I've ever spent, and I need to read everything he's ever written; the lyrical nature of his prose, the acrobatic turns of phrase, the strange honesty.
sarahconnor89757's review against another edition
3.0
Am I the only one who thought this was subpar?
paperknotbooks's review against another edition
4.0
Everyone should read this. It's only a "pamphlet" after all!
shimmer's review against another edition
4.0
This review was written in 2007 for the now defunct literary journal Small Spiral Notebook. I think it was the first time I tried to review a more experimental book of fiction.
It’s easy enough to categorize Gary Lutz with that faint bit of praise “a writers’ writer,” but doing so takes the easy way out of engaging his unique, complex stories. And the easy route is something Lutz doesn’t allow himself, his fiction, or the language he uses. His work displays a rare unity in which each word and sentence reflect the larger story and its characters, weaving together form and function, art and craft to reward thoughtful reading and rereading.
As in his earlier collections, the stories in Lutz’ latest book, Partial List of People to Bleach, are plotted in only the most tangential ways and are deceptive in their brevity. Each story greets the reader like a puzzle, composed from elements never obvious or expected. The fleeting, hazy moments of Lutz’ fiction are seldom long enough to create a false sense of clarity, because as one character says, “The only way to ruin your eyes is to keep looking at people.” They are just the right length to be read quickly, irresistibly read again, and reconsidered for hours and days afterward. Though the collection is only a slim fifty-six pages, it’s a slow read because the mind gets so caught up making sense of and savoring what has been read. Moving from one story on to the next is harder than with more conventional, familiar writing, or with language that hasn’t been challenged to offer more than easy descriptions.
Most of Lutz’ stories concern down-and-out, outcast, and often disturbing characters with awkward obsessions and kinks. The protagonist of the opening story, “Home, School, Office” is a college professor who admits to, even revels in, being disliked by his students and largely incompetent in his profession. There are incestuous families, damaged children, and men and women as coldly distant from the world and each other as the narrator in “I Was in Kilter with Him a Little,” who describes her former husband as “largely a passerby.” She goes on to say that
So much of what makes Lutz’ stories distinctive and difficult and worthwhile is in this passage: the characters seeing each other only from a distance, reflected in the language of “this husband” with no hint of possession or closeness; the descriptions of lives assembled from disjointed, apparently unrelated details, relying on the reader to put them together; and sentences built the same way, out of phrases like “get a done day butchered improvingly,” insisting on genuine effort to work out exactly what’s meant despite each word being familiar in isolation. The stories of this collection are studded with details that jar and jab the reader in the same way the wife mentioned above goes on to relate how she “thumbed out most of the teeth from a comb of his, stuck them upright in rough tufts of our carpet--whatever it took to get a barefoot person hurt revolutionarily.” These stories bare not our feet, but our preconceptions about fiction and how it functions, then they hurt us as revolutionarily as the hidden teeth of a comb.
In “Six Stories,” a series of ambiguously connected vignettes, the narrator waits “for someone to say something in a language that wasn’t shot.” Gary Lutz offers just such a language, uniting his characters and his readers in a challenge to make sense of the world through details ordinary enough on their own but brought together in unexpected, puzzling ways, and the world is made new in the process. Whereas other authors rely on fantasy to achieve this recreation, Lutz turns the supposedly banal and mundane into anything but, and reminds us of the constant negotiations of confusion and construction that life—and, at its best, literature—demands. It isn’t always, or often, pleasant, but it is as rich with possibility as an observation made by the child narrator of “Tic Douloureux”:
It’s easy enough to categorize Gary Lutz with that faint bit of praise “a writers’ writer,” but doing so takes the easy way out of engaging his unique, complex stories. And the easy route is something Lutz doesn’t allow himself, his fiction, or the language he uses. His work displays a rare unity in which each word and sentence reflect the larger story and its characters, weaving together form and function, art and craft to reward thoughtful reading and rereading.
As in his earlier collections, the stories in Lutz’ latest book, Partial List of People to Bleach, are plotted in only the most tangential ways and are deceptive in their brevity. Each story greets the reader like a puzzle, composed from elements never obvious or expected. The fleeting, hazy moments of Lutz’ fiction are seldom long enough to create a false sense of clarity, because as one character says, “The only way to ruin your eyes is to keep looking at people.” They are just the right length to be read quickly, irresistibly read again, and reconsidered for hours and days afterward. Though the collection is only a slim fifty-six pages, it’s a slow read because the mind gets so caught up making sense of and savoring what has been read. Moving from one story on to the next is harder than with more conventional, familiar writing, or with language that hasn’t been challenged to offer more than easy descriptions.
Most of Lutz’ stories concern down-and-out, outcast, and often disturbing characters with awkward obsessions and kinks. The protagonist of the opening story, “Home, School, Office” is a college professor who admits to, even revels in, being disliked by his students and largely incompetent in his profession. There are incestuous families, damaged children, and men and women as coldly distant from the world and each other as the narrator in “I Was in Kilter with Him a Little,” who describes her former husband as “largely a passerby.” She goes on to say that
He had an unconsoling side, this husband, and a mean streak, and a pain that gadded about in his mouth, his jaw, and there was a bumble of blond hair all over him, and he couldn’t count on sleep, on dreams, to get a done day butchered improvingly.
He drove a mutt of a car and was the lone typewriter mechanic left in the territory, a servicer of devastated platens, a releaser of stuck keys.
I would let him go broadly and unwitnessed into his day.
So much of what makes Lutz’ stories distinctive and difficult and worthwhile is in this passage: the characters seeing each other only from a distance, reflected in the language of “this husband” with no hint of possession or closeness; the descriptions of lives assembled from disjointed, apparently unrelated details, relying on the reader to put them together; and sentences built the same way, out of phrases like “get a done day butchered improvingly,” insisting on genuine effort to work out exactly what’s meant despite each word being familiar in isolation. The stories of this collection are studded with details that jar and jab the reader in the same way the wife mentioned above goes on to relate how she “thumbed out most of the teeth from a comb of his, stuck them upright in rough tufts of our carpet--whatever it took to get a barefoot person hurt revolutionarily.” These stories bare not our feet, but our preconceptions about fiction and how it functions, then they hurt us as revolutionarily as the hidden teeth of a comb.
In “Six Stories,” a series of ambiguously connected vignettes, the narrator waits “for someone to say something in a language that wasn’t shot.” Gary Lutz offers just such a language, uniting his characters and his readers in a challenge to make sense of the world through details ordinary enough on their own but brought together in unexpected, puzzling ways, and the world is made new in the process. Whereas other authors rely on fantasy to achieve this recreation, Lutz turns the supposedly banal and mundane into anything but, and reminds us of the constant negotiations of confusion and construction that life—and, at its best, literature—demands. It isn’t always, or often, pleasant, but it is as rich with possibility as an observation made by the child narrator of “Tic Douloureux”:
That day I began to develop an appreciation for how things upstairs sounded to people underneath. From every footfall, every stride, came a creak that rippled outward until it overspread the entire ceiling of the room. The effect was one of resounding activity, of achievements far and wide.
udai's review against another edition
1.0
It took me forever to finish this book. It had so many great sentences that you could hang on the wall, but somehow it felt like the writer was only interested in making these intricate sentences and didn't bother putting the story line in mined. I really got bored and lost interest in the middle of every single story. Still -somehow - a very well written book that any literature geek will enjoy.
xterminal's review
4.0
Gary Lutz, Partial List of People to Bleach (Future Tense, 2007)
I picked up Lutz's chap Partial List of People to Bleach at, seemingly, exactly the right time; Stories in the Worst Way, his first collection (from all the way back in 1996), just got itself a paperback release from Calamari Press and has been getting mentions in every rag around the globe, it seems. People are rediscovering Gary Lutz, and paging through this slim volume, it's obvious why.
“Another night of roundabout apologizing, and she reached for a shoulder bag, not one of her regular daytime totles. She tipped it all out, fingered everything preservingly where it fell.
The whole business was already looking a little too votive to me.
First the smoot, the flaked razures and other collects, she had abstracted from the gutter between blades of an overemployed disposable shaver. (It had taken, she said, the edge of in index card to reclaim it.)
Then, in a mouth-rinse bottle, a few fluidal ounces of sea-blue slosh from a compress that had been used whenever there were immaculate agonies behind a knee.
And a smutched inch or so of adhesive tape from a homemade bandage, into which pores had confided their oily fluences.”
(“I Was in Kilter with Him a Little”)
It's like Lydia Davis and Tao Lin had some sort of twisted, deformed offspring, except that Lutz is more talented than either of them. My only problem with it is that there's not more of this; I'll be picking up his other collections posthaste. This is well worth checking out, and for the price, how can you go wrong? *** ½
I picked up Lutz's chap Partial List of People to Bleach at, seemingly, exactly the right time; Stories in the Worst Way, his first collection (from all the way back in 1996), just got itself a paperback release from Calamari Press and has been getting mentions in every rag around the globe, it seems. People are rediscovering Gary Lutz, and paging through this slim volume, it's obvious why.
“Another night of roundabout apologizing, and she reached for a shoulder bag, not one of her regular daytime totles. She tipped it all out, fingered everything preservingly where it fell.
The whole business was already looking a little too votive to me.
First the smoot, the flaked razures and other collects, she had abstracted from the gutter between blades of an overemployed disposable shaver. (It had taken, she said, the edge of in index card to reclaim it.)
Then, in a mouth-rinse bottle, a few fluidal ounces of sea-blue slosh from a compress that had been used whenever there were immaculate agonies behind a knee.
And a smutched inch or so of adhesive tape from a homemade bandage, into which pores had confided their oily fluences.”
(“I Was in Kilter with Him a Little”)
It's like Lydia Davis and Tao Lin had some sort of twisted, deformed offspring, except that Lutz is more talented than either of them. My only problem with it is that there's not more of this; I'll be picking up his other collections posthaste. This is well worth checking out, and for the price, how can you go wrong? *** ½
hahildebrand's review
4.0
Kind of amazing, but also kind of too much of a good thing. I loved it, but it exhausted me. Might be a while before I delve into his other stuff.
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