Stories in the Worst Way

Rating:
Summary: pretentious doggerel
Review: I guess this is the type of writing you would expect from a writer more focused on language games than actual story telling. Since he doesn't have the talent to engage the reader in a narrative, he instead resorts to abstract high falutin syntax to try and get the job done, trying to mask over his mediocrity with (sometimes witty, most times awful) aphoristic nonsense. This kind of intellectual masturbation is the last refuge for writers with little talent but tons of ego. The people who believe that Lutz tells the "dark truths about our lives" are people who haven't read more than five books in the last ten years; they are people weaned on television, DVDs, and Charles Bukowski, the people who wear their ignorant nihilism as a badge of honor; they are those young people you've probably overheard in a bar saying things like "yeah man, life is so disgusting." Yes, life is disgusting, but no need to employ an even more disgusting prose style that symbolizes nothing but your own mental vacuity. And for those who believe that Lutz is not embraced by the establishment because he's too truthful, well that's just idiotic. He's not accepted by the so-called evil establishment because his writing is awful, plain and simple. He can tell his dark, cliched, postmodern truths all he wants, but as long as he continues to write with one hand on the keyboard and the other on his wang then his words will never be worth more than the paper they're printed on. Five stars for this guy? Yeah right.

Rating:
Summary: pretentious doggerel
Review: I guess this is the type of writing you would expect from a writer more focused on language games than actual story telling. Since he doesn't have the talent to engage the reader in a narrative, he instead resorts to abstract high falutin syntax to try and get the job done, trying to mask over his mediocrity with (sometimes witty, most times awful) aphoristic nonsense. This kind of intellectual masturbation is the last refuge for writers with little talent but tons of ego. The people who believe that Lutz tells the "dark truths about our lives" are people who haven't read more than five books in the last ten years; they are people weaned on television, DVDs, and Charles Bukowski, the people who wear their ignorant nihilism as a badge of honor; they are those young people you've probably overheard in a bar saying things like "yeah man, life is so disgusting." Yes, life is disgusting, but no need to employ an even more disgusting prose style that symbolizes nothing but your own mental vacuity. And for those who believe that Lutz is not embraced by the establishment because he's too truthful, well that's just idiotic. He's not accepted by the so-called evil establishment because his writing is awful, plain and simple. He can tell his dark, cliched, postmodern truths all he wants, but as long as he continues to write with one hand on the keyboard and the other on his wang then his words will never be worth more than the paper they're printed on. Five stars for this guy? Yeah right.

Rating:
Summary: Cultural Dysphoria As A Lovely Verb
Review: Lutz is a master wordsmith. He is Pablo Neruda chained to a wall, injected with heroin and winched in hard between American culture and a hard place. He is Sherwood Anderson nauseated by time travel. He is Thomas Pyncheon finally equipped with the brevity in the soul of wit. He is Kurt Vonnegut leaking sad little pools of schadenfreude.
The sad reverberations of his comedy and the comic undertones of his tragedy are so subtly realized that his grace may escape you if let it. Don't let it . The ghosts of our discontent orbit through his stories with dismal whimsy. It's the best collection of short stories of the last half century. Lutz can do in three paragraphs what it takes others a novel to accomplish.
Extraordinary writer, haunting book.

Rating:
Summary: Art demands an open mind.
Review: Man, oh man.. many people recurrently never quite get it ... . Art is not a concern of telling easily digestable stories, and writing is not about "getting the job done".
But enough bickering. Gary Lutz is among my favorite living writers because his language is so daring, creative, and skillful, and his ideas are interesting. Anyone who reads this work and thinks that it's bad writing just isn't paying attention. It's excellent writing- a kind of writing that's not easy to accomplish, and it's rather risky. People have engrained word relationships into their heads, not to mention 'reality scenarios', so when those relationships and scenarios are broken dramatically, people tend to respond dramatically. What Gary Lutz does is twist these things violently so that we're forced into different modes of perception.
In short: these stories fascinate me.
But some people don't wish to challenge their perceptions, ... and so be it. They can have what they wish. But if they wish to criticize what they haven't bothered to try to understand, then they're somewhat out of line, and would be better advised to keep quiet.
The filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said that those filmmakers who are great artists are great because rather than working on the audience's terms and giving the audience what the artists think they want, the artists work on their own terms and force the audience to work on the artists' terms.
Samples are always helpful (this one from "Positions") :

The trouble with coming was that I actually did arrive somewhere. I arrived at the place my body had already left. I got there just in time to get a good look at what had happened where things were. I looked at the person on whom I had been a passenger--in every case, my sister. I looked at this woman, who was a form of transportation, a mode of shipment.
Then what?
I think I stopped looking.
For months it was like that in exactly one room. It was a room in which everything was first on the one hand and then on the other hand, and before long the hands went back into the pockets and were out of view.

Rating:
Summary: Compulsion as a motivation for living
Review: Susan Sontag speaks of the need for getting back to the sensous surface of art, to see what stories provide that fascinates in and of themselves. Gary Lutz is one of the few writers who actually gets there. His stories are sinuous, the sentences tightly wound, words spilling out in ways we don't expect. Lutz' stories cut right through to the heart of what makes us what we are. Rather than dilemmas and big tragedies and conflicts, the situations of these characters consist of the daily, little human hang-ups we all have: "If I have a problem, it is this: there is a story in which everything costs a dollar." These little hang-ups add up to large blots on the self, to full blown obsessions and compulsions. In his scrutiny of the family and of the social rituals that we use to bind our lives together, Lutz can be both funny and merciless, calmy telling us, for instance, that "The wedding was curt and almost entirely without result." It is the movement between the humorous and the disturbed, the ability to show the dark and light faces of the same situation, that gives Lutz his strength. A funny and disturbing book, Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way is an auspicious debut. -- Brian Evenson ([e-mail])

Rating:
Summary: I just didn't "get" his style of writing
Review: There's really not alot for me to say here, except that clearly some people relate differently to different styles of writing. I didn't like this book at all. It didn't make me "feel" anything as I read the stories. Most often, I was like "huh"? Please know that I am not one who needs a "point" to a story in order to appreciate it. I can find alot of pleasure in one or two sentences, depending on how they are written. I very much prefer the styles of writing found in "Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories" and "In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction".

Rating:
Summary: I just didn't "get" his style of writing
Review: There's really not alot for me to say here, except that clearly some people relate differently to different styles of writing. I didn't like this book at all. It didn't make me "feel" anything as I read the stories. Most often, I was like "huh"? Please know that I am not one who needs a "point" to a story in order to appreciate it. I can find alot of pleasure in one or two sentences, depending on how they are written. I very much prefer the styles of writing found in "Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories" and "In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction".

Rating:
Summary: I just didn't "get" his style of writing
Review: There's really not alot for me to say here, except that clearly some people relate differently to different styles of writing. I didn't like this book at all. It didn't make me "feel" anything as I read the stories. Most often, I was like "huh"? Please know that I am not one who needs a "point" to a story in order to appreciate it. I can find alot of pleasure in one or two sentences, depending on how they are written. I very much prefer the styles of writing found in "Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories" and "In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction".

Rating:
Summary: An unsung master of the language
Review: This book, the first and still the only collection by one of America's most unappreciated writers, hits so hard in so many places that it's hard to find a starting point. Lutz's language is thickly woven and can be off-putting to the uneducated reader. However, his subjects also put off the most educated, leaving his audience spare. The fact that today's critics can walk around so high-and-mighty is a travesty to the world of literature, because it is spreading, and we are seeing a day where Lutz and his contemporaries are dismissed because they dare too much. Keep daring, Gary, and we will keep fighting for you.

Rating:
Summary: Inspissance
Review: This word--I know what it means even though I'm sure it's made-up. That's the kind of edge that Gary Lutz dances on and gleefully. He will surprise a reader with a turn of phrase or a turn of plot or character that elicits a gasp and sometimes also a guffaw. I particularly loved "The Daughter," the last story in the book, where the narrator creates an index about his daughter. "Inconsolably okay, 00" This book is inconsolably underread.