The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Stories in the Worst Way, by Gary Lutz
reviewed by Alan Tinkler

Gary Lutz. Stories in the Worst Way. 3rd Bed, 2002. 152 pp. Paper: $8.00.

There is no finer writer of sentences than Gary Lutz; his sentences are both original and sublime. In “Waking Hours,” a story about a divorced middle-aged man who is often on the road, the protagonist describes his apartment: “My life was cartoned off in three rooms and bath, one of several dozen lives banked above a side street. I convinced myself that there were hours midway through the night when the walls slurred over and became membranes, allowing seepages and exchanges from unit to unit.” With sentences like these, Lutz accomplishes two things. First, he forces his readers to slow down and relish the movement within each sentence. Second, his sentences force readers to reexamine the ordinary moments, the routine habits, of daily life. Throughout the collection, the first sentence often establishes the ethical inquiry of the story. “Slops” begins: “Because I had colitis, I divided much of my between-class time among seventeen carefully chosen faculty restrooms, never following the same itinerary two days in a row, using a pocket notebook to keep track.” At a fundamental level, Lutz demonstrates that we understand the world through language. And, thankfully, Lutz is a careful observer. “Devotions,” a story whose protagonist has had a series of wives, begins, “From time to time I show up in myself just long enough for people to know they are not in the room alone,” and ends, “What was wrong was very simple. Sometimes her life and mine fell on the same day.” Stories in the Worst Way is one of the finest short-story collections of the last decade. 3rd Bed is to be commended for reprinting the collection, first published in 1996 by Knopf.