The complete Gary Lutz

This transportive omnibus of new and previously collected work by Lutz (Stories in the Worst Way) highlights his precise and distinct method of storytelling. From the very first line ("What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life?") Lutz holds the reader in a world where characters' expectations must be vigilantly managed and lowered. His narrators are consummate losers and "historians of grievance," frequently divorced, usually dwelling in some "guttery" third-tier city, and fighting the sense that they had been born "for no reason other than for hair to have an extra place to grow in the world." While plot is secondary in Lutz's stories, some events are memorable. In "Recessional" a grotesque epiphany plays out at a McDonald's, and in "Slops," a teacher with colitis makes an all-too-vivid confession. Drama comes from the devastating turn of phrase at which Lutz excels: a woman doesn't walk so much as "plump"; a woman's daughters are "tamped down, battening on her"; lives are not so much lived as they are "a dry run for everything certain to follow," and the misfortunes of a woman are said to have "creased her life for the worse." Lutz's madcap genius burnishes unpleasant material into lasting gems. (Dec.)

A writer's writer gets his due in a welcome gathering of short fictions from three decades."If you are looking for story and plot, you have come to the wrong place." So writes Brian Evenson in his foreword to this omnibus collection of stories by Lutz (Assisted Living, 2017, etc.), gathering five published volumes and a few unpublished pieces. Evenson is right: Not much happens inside a Lutz story save for some neatly written sentences with, more often than not, some strange non sequitur at their heart: "After lunch, in the undemanding dark of a movie theater where he goggled at some stabby, Roman-numeralled sequel, I would plug my ears and loot my own heart." Most of Lutz's stories seem more prose poems than traditional yarns with beginnings, middles, and ends. His characters tend to be divorced or on the way to divorce ("Then came nights when, lying awake beside my final wife, I would spend too much time putting my finger on what was wrong. I was wearing the finger out."). Their time is invested in the ordinaryin the opening story, a man makes love without much conviction, anticipating the "accurate parting of the ways," then goes to a diner, gets himself inky with a newspaper, and goes to a washroom with a door worthy of Kafka's Castle. That story is called "Sororally," which reflects Lutz's liking of arcane words, glittering in his prose like emeralds in a streambed. Sometimes he lets out a quiet joke"there are two types of people," he writes, adding: "Just don't ask me where they live"and sometimes he invites a question without answering it, as with a fellow who has found a "new way to cheat on his wife" with no confirming details. Sometimes he accomplishes all this in just a couple of paragraphs, more often just a few pages, though the book is a sturdy volume that proves his aside, "A lot of toner has gone into all I have done."A pleasure for fans of postmodern fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

How far back should a man like me have to go?
She needed to buy a bag, a duffel, to collect the things of hers that were still in the other man's apartment. So we went to the odd-lots shop on the corner, a surplus store, army- and-navy. The bags were all of one size, one color (an obvious, unbursting blue), one price: ten bucks. How much stuff had she left at his place? "Gosh, gallons, I guess," she said. She imagined that all of it could be squeezed or rolled up and that it would be nice to see the things that way, condensed like a summary of another concluded part of her life, to which there had been so many parts, unlike my life, which had hardly massed itself onto my body.This was just an errand, she kept insisting. Everything between them was between them now, she said. What didn't I get? And it wasn't as if she had been living there, she said, though that was where her mail kept going, the packets and chubby parcels that were always being forwarded to her from tearjerker towns farther south. I had never seen this man. I never knew what might have been firing through him to her or what was yet to come out of the facts about him. The two of them had never gotten around to taking pictures. We stood in the checkout line, one finger of mine curled around one of hers. Then all of hers ganging up suddenly on my upper arm. "This is the easiest thing I've ever done," she said. I had always been hearing this exact same thing from people, always on the kind of day that gets troubled down to its veriest grains. I'd heard it from lady dentists with purplish scoldings of tattoo on their shoulders, from men even older than I, reachers who roped themselves off from whatever they were reaching for. She told me to wait outside the store while she went to the man's place. It was only blocks and blocks away. The etiquette of the matter would take maybe ten minutes max. 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. She found me at last and sat me down on the bench and said, "He cried and cried." Then: "I cooked for him." Then: "I made him something fussy for dessert. I wanted it to be a good-bye." She made an effort to describe something merrily chocolate that had trouble retaining its shape or else had to be cut with care into squares. Her eyes looked fatigued, glassine. Then: "I made it clear it wasn't old times." The duffel bag was empty. She explained that her things weren't all in one place in his apartment. It wasn't as simple as all that.Things of hers had hit it off with his in dresser drawers, paternal suitcases, two snug closets, a laundry hamper, knottily hanging baskets. And some of his things, his finery, looked a lot like hers, it turned out. It was going to take sorting, and the sorting could take hours. Excerpted from The Complete Gary Lutz by Gary Lutz All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.