On "People Are Already Full" by Gary Lutz (427 words) ***

Here's a short short by Lutz that feels in some ways put together sentence by sentence. In a way, I feel like Lutz's story is about the creation of the story itself, the difficulty of putting one together--it starts with two characters, elaborating on each, pulling itself against space toward them, changing views. Read the piece here at Thee Invisible.

On "Susceptibility" by Gary Lutz (95 words) ***

This strange piece is more like the suggestion of a story than an actual story. Lutz hints at something between two characters by giving us a setup and then failing to deliver the story itself. We are left to imagine. Read the story here at Anarchy Is Hyperbole.

On "SMTWTFS" by Gary Lutz (1318 words) ***

Like the days of the week, this tale rehearses for us the tedious and unsustained life of a man who bounces from one relationship to another, or more often one encounter to another, none of them making much of an impact on him other than the general meaninglessness of it all. Read the story here are Web del Sol.

On "Contractions" by Gary Lutz (3139 words) ****

"Contractions" starts promising enough, with an account of a kid who decides to reveal all of her parents' secrets from before marriage. In a sense, the story then revolves around marriage and relationships, the various ones this girl grows up to have, all of them full of their own secrets and sadnesses and smells. Read the story here at Web del Sol.

On "Street Map of the Continent" by Gary Lutz (753 words) ****

This story about a man's loss of his wife is one whose very deadness of language seems to hint at the deadness within the man's own life. Slowly, he empties the house of the woman's possessions, just going through motions. Read the story here at Web del Sol.

On "Devotions" by Gary Lutz (1182 words) ****

What is it that makes for a good marriage? The narrator in this story moves from wife to wife, one a boozer, one young, and so on. In one telling passage, the narrator recounts having an apartment where he realizes the person above him has figured out the arrangement of his furniture and is mimicking his each move. Creepy, I suppose, but I can't help but think the narrator is making some kind of comment about marriage, about being known so intimately that there is no escaping surveillance. Read the story here at Web del Sol.

On "Sororally by Gary Lutz (1334 words) ****

Essentially the story of a work relationship--or date--that ends up going nowhere, the real charm in this piece is the language. "Eyes chance ambitiously" onto another's. Tasks are inherited from one day to the next. It's the beauty of the verbs and the occasional surprising descriptor. You can read the story here at Web del Sol (scroll down to the second piece).

On "Stories in the Worst Way" by Gary Lutz ***

All these pieces are short, and all have been, it feels like, edited down from something much larger. Lutz is one of those practitioners of the sentence, which means that every line counts--and virtually every line is something totally original. People don't just sit. They uncrack their bones into a repository. That sort of description, while beautiful (and actually, that's not a quote--it's just something akin to what Lutz would do), makes for difficult reading if one wants to go quickly. But it's worth slowing down and savoring the work.

Not that the stories themselves, beyond the language, always hold up something that original. Quite often, they're more or less slice of life pieces without much of a climax or epiphany. In "Sororally," a man goes out with a coworker, but a relationship doesn't work out. In "Waking Hours," a man stumbles through life at a job, spending time with the kid from his former marriage, and looking for gay lovers. In "Street Map of the Continent," a man deals with the fallout of a wife who leaves him (or dies). The latter story ends on a strange, seemingly unrelated tangent, as do many of Lutz's other pieces. In that sense, they remind me a bit of Lydia Davis's work, which has a fan base and its critical followers but of which I have not been one.

In "Slops," a man considers some events affected by his constant bouts with colitis. "Devotions" recounts marriages; "When You Got Back" involves a man in a relationship with a high school senior who goes out for a walk and meets another man with laundry that has been done but that doesn't look it (perhaps some kind of comment on the man's own behavior?).

"Esprit de L'Elevator" breaks what is already a short story up into even smaller pieces. The man at its heart meets four people in his apartment building each day. He begins writing a book for them--and then excerpts of said book are quoted. It's as if Lutz is just having fun with the little snippets here, whatever neat thing might strike his fancy.

In "Education," which seems vaguely set in some eighteenth-century world but also in our own, a man goes to "educate" a young miss for her mom and grandma. The story revolves around geography (learning town names) and, as one would sort of expect, sex and innocence.

"Certain Riddances" involves a man's life at an office and is full of fun and interesting asides--how names weigh us down with expectation. But like so many of the tales, it peters out with information that has seemingly little to do with anything that has gone before it, focusing on the man's life at home. The story could be about the way in which our relationships are in many ways anonymous, how we don't know people even when we do, and how what we do know impinges on our ability to connect. So taken in by words and occasional grand ideas is the writer, throughout this piece and others, that one rarely feels much for the characters or situations.

"Pavilion" is about marketing or public speaking or family relationships or all of them. A man speaks about forging families to others, forges one of his own sort of--and others. The last line here is memorable enough that it demands reading of the story itself to get to.

In "Recessional" a man lives with a divorced woman and her daughters. It's one of the longer stories in the collection, and as such, Lutz spreads out a bit, and that is in itself curious to see. A large amount of space is given over to the man emptying his pocket out on a dresser while his wife talks. I've never read so brilliant of a description for something so mundane.

"The Preventer of Sorrows" focuses on rooms--a woman's various rentals. Rooms with roommates and rooms alone, rooms with partners and husbands. Rooms in rowhouses and attic rooms. This manner of telling a story, not unlike Susan Minot's "Lust" is often compelling, but Lutz brings with it his own skewed vision such that the piece is something very different from anything Minot wrote. The piece ends with a profound line about how a place can overnight become something else. It makes you think about how we assign meaning to the places we go.

"Onesome" is about the struggle of staying in such relationships and how we in some ways subordinate our own lives in order to continue on with these others who have become part of us.

"Not the Hand but Where the Hand Has Been" covers much the same ground as many of the other stories, especially the early ones--a failing marriage, a set of jobs. Here, the focus becomes indexing, and the story itself features an index, and the narrator throws more and more of his life into categories (and into the jobs that he has).

The collection is full of so many stories, so many short ones, that it would be ponderous to recount all of them. Instead, one notices common themes and settings--offices, relationships, teaching, a kid. The pieces often feel as if part of a dream, given that the situations seem random and often the happenings go off on seemingly nonsensical tangents, even as they remain generally oh-so-commonplace. But Lutz's real strength in the sentence itself--so many beautiful lines. They get stacked up so much that his stories are probably better savored one at a time than read in a collection like this, where they tend to overwhelm and where the thread of the narratives gets lost.