by Gary Lutz
ISBN: 097094280X
I don’t like saying so, but over and over again I found myself thinking I just don’t get it while I reading this collection of stories.
It’s possible it’s just me, though I am not a particularly obtuse reader. In my defense, I do enjoy things that aren’t so-called easy reads. (Plowing the Dark or Gould’s Book of Fish or Colson Whitehead‘s novels, just as a few examples. Hell, I’m not taking part in Infinite Summer because I’d rather spend the time on 1,000+ new-to-me pages instead. You may question my taste, but I am not a lazy reader.)
This is not to say I think these are bad stories, I don’t. I was frequently confused, so I can’t say I think they were brilliant; I think they were a kind of story I just don’t get. They were intriguing, and at times the language could catch me, but all too often, I was left wondering what the hell was going on, and not in a particularly good or fun way.
I kept expecting the puzzles pieces to snap together, and despite moments like the opening line of “Being Good in October” (“The wedding was curt and almost entirely without result.”) or the ending lines of “Yours” (“There are two types of people in this world. Just don’t ask me where they live.”), things did not connect for me. I’m keeping the book; I think I might read it again, at some later date, to see if it feels any different.
In retrospect, I wonder if the blurbs on the back cover praising Lutz’s sentences were actually meant as a tip off: the sentences taken singly might amaze, but that the whole stories… Well, they didn’t knock my socks off. Not this time, anyway.
