The Review of Contemporary Fiction

This Is Not It, by Lynne Tillman
reviewed by Joanna Howard

Lynne Tillman. This Is Not It. Distributed Art Publishers, 2002. 283 pp. $27.50.

Lynne Tillman’s This Is Not It offers a pastiche of stylistic responses to contemporary works by such artists as Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, Barbara Kruger, and Peter Dreher. Through her own unconventional approach to the short story, Tillman blurs barriers between art and life, writer and reader, and fiction and truth. Tillman bookends the collection with two long, intricate stories—“Come and Go” and “Thrilled to Death”—which pull together characters whose tenuous bonds twist together briefly only to fan out again as their lives separate. Many of the collection’s central stories perform more ethereally, closely reflecting the mood or effect of their paired artworks. “A Picture of Time” responds beautifully to Stephen Ellis’s Untitled, a work of primary color in oil scraping across linen in vertical and horizontal bands, interrupted centrally by twisting thicknesses of light. Tillman’s story picks up the texture of the paint, and its linen foundation, in an examination of time and imagination through the conceptual language of color. “Ode to Le Petomane” tightly reflects Roni Horn’s Between Visibility and Nonexistence as a man tries to erase himself from his fiancée’s life. These stories also hold a deep continuity in absence and negation, as most acutely demonstrated in the title story, whose narrator tells us, “In the wrong place at the wrong time, the wrong people and I are obviously in a drama, a tragedy or comedy.” Tillman’s characters either never quite connect or, in connecting, recognize that there is little to hold them together. Tillman’s attention to double entendres and wordplay allows an eerie humor to break into the overwhelming loss and fear permeating the text, to offer slippage only in the possibility of lies and stories. Beautifully designed, with cover pages for each story, Tillman’s This Is Not It offers a fresh exploration of the expectations and effects of art and imagination.