I Looked Alive: Stories

Rating:
Summary: he looked alive
Review: Gary Lutz is the type of writer that young writers should look to emulate; not necessarily in his approach or in his means but in his effort. Nothing is taken lightly in the process of the creation of these stories. Every word is intended. What else can be said for a writer in a time of such dredge? He means what he says in a way that will leave you guessing. Gary Lutz, this book in particular, is ahead of his time.

Rating:
Summary: Mother Tongue Kissing
Review: I Looked Alive is Gary Lutz's second collection of short stories. In it, Lutz writes wincingly good portraits of disaffected strangers in a style that is dark with both humor and forboding. His writing is a nattering nervous marvel of twists and turns with the language; he reveals our mutual tongue to be something that is rarely mutual and is often metaphorically grim . So it's no wonder that reviewers from Jane magazine to The Believer often have to skirt around the issue of what Lutz is exactly trying to say; they know only vaguely and cannot put one digit upon it for any enlightening amount of time. This is just as it should be with Lutz. Reviewers, just like regular people (it's been said that they ARE actually regular people but I need more proof of this), often are fearfully hostile of what they do not understand. Lutz gets more than his fair share of this kind of review.

What lies at the core of Lutz's work is the aching heart of the misunderstood, the stoic shy prideful shame of the perverse, and the limp damp coldness of the never loved or those who cannot love. His characters appear and disappear in confusing mists. They often zoom into pin-point focus and then dissipate as you read further. He's a master of the camera trick- or maybe a better word would be camera obscura trick- and like all good photographers, he illuminates only what he wants you to see. The distortions are his will, you must allow him to control the focus. Some people will not like this. They prefer the illusion of control, or, at least, of some control. Lutz will not give you this. If he lulls you into a sense of familiar structure, it is only to pull the rug out more firmly when the time comes.

I Looked Alive is a testament to the tender beauty of hideous apparitions . Never has there been more delicately detailed prose written about a crotch hair or a used bandage. You supply the much-needed squeamishness, he'll supply the squalid common vehicle for it. Never has there been a deeper heart writing about those sealed off from genuine love or affection and how those characters percieve their lives, how they manage their survival in a world full of roaring billboards, fast food joints, supermodels, MTV, cinema mega-plexes, highway rest areas and television commericals. They are as disattached from the joy of life as an amputee is from a missing body part. They still have some twinges of feelings in the missing limb. But they can no longer locate its source.

Lutz is the finest writer of his generation. You have to squint to see the characters sometimes. But their lives will soak into your skin and seep into your heart with a heavy weariness that repels you at the same time that you want to comfort them, pay them attention, give them warmth. How he does this in a scant dozen to half-dozen pages is just flat out word-working genius. Often reading I Looked Alive is like french-kissing a stranger in the dark; it feels both sexily daring and a trifle disgusting. And just who is the stranger here?

I guess what I'm actually saying is that I Looked Alive is a fairly difficult read. Most of the books at your local bookstore are not. If you care to read the works of those who struggle against the glib tides of common narrative to find the sad beauty in the freakishly odd uncommonalities that willfully bind our lives to those we do not always wish to recognize, then you will be rewarded with feelings and thoughts you've never had before. Now, think hard on this. How many things have you read that can honestly claim to achieve this mavel of perception and misperception?