Pulls

by Garielle Lutz, Kevin Sampsell (Introduction)

"'Pulls' is a classic example of a Gary Lutz story," writes Kevin Sampsell, founder of Future Tense Books, in his introduction to this issue of Recommended Reading. "It passes what I call 'The Lutz Sentence Test'—close your eyes and point anywhere and be astounded by whatever sentence you land on. (I have customers do this all the time when I show them Lutz's books at my bookstore job.) 'Pulls' also displays the kind of push and pull (no punning intended) between the isolating sadness and dark humor that colors much of Lutz's work. My reaction while reading 'Pulls' is that I want to laugh out loud, but stabs of heart-aching sentences suffocate my urges. It is exactly this push/pull craftsmanship that makes Lutz a writer unlike any other. Sometimes I think maybe Lorrie Moore does this too, or Sam Lipsyte—both with crafty precision. But Lutz goes a shade darker, writing with language that would seem confrontational if it weren’t so dang perfect."

About the author:
Gary Lutz is the author of the short-story collections Stories in the Worst Way, I Looked Alive, Partial List of People to Bleach, and Divorcer.

About the Guest Editor:
Future Tense Books has published chapbooks, paperbacks, and now hardcover books by emerging writers for over twenty years. We specialize in literary fiction, memoir, poetry, sometimes blurring the lines of those genres. Some of the authors and books we've published have gone on to further success at bigger publishing houses. We've published debuts by authors such as Elizabeth Ellen, Chelsea Martin, Riley Michael Parker, Myriam Gurba, Chloe Caldwell, Zoe Trope, and Prathna Lor, as well as legendary names such as Mike Topp, Richard Meltzer, and Gary Lutz. In the past, we've done collaborations with Manic D Press and currently co-publish a chapbook series with Scout Books. Future Tense Books was started by Kevin Sampsell and now includes editor/designer Bryan Coffelt and editor Tina Morgan. We are based in Portland, Oregon.

About the Publisher:
Electric Literature is an independent publisher working to ensure that literature remains a vibrant presence in popular culture. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction, accompanied by a Single Sentence Animation. Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations: the author chooses a favorite sentence and we commission an artist to interpret it. Stay connected with us through email, Facebook, and Twitter, and find previous Electric Literature picks in the Recommended Reading archives.

13 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 11, 2013

About the author

Garielle Lutz is an American writer of both poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Sleepingfish, NOON, The Quarterly, Conjunctions, Unsaid, Fence, StoryQuarterly, The Believer, Cimarron Review, 3rd Bed, Slate Magazine, New York Tyrant, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Apocalypse Reader (Thunder's Mouth Press), PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books), The Random House Treasury of Light Verse and in the film 60 Writers/60 Places.

A collection of her short fiction, Stories in the Worst Way, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in November 1996 and re-published by 3rd Bed in 2002 and Calamari Press in 2009. Lutz's second collection of short stories, I Looked Alive, was published by the now-defunct Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and republished by Black Square Editions/Brooklyn Rail in 2010. Partial List of People to Bleach, a chapbook of both new and rare early stories (published pseudonymously as Lee Stone in Gordon Lish's The Quarterly) was released by Future Tense Books in 2007. Divorcer, a collection of seven stories, was released by Calamari Press in 2011.

In 1996, Lutz was recipient of a literature grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1999, she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

In 2020, Lutz came out as a transgender woman.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Gary Lutz, writer extraordinaire.

My first exposure to American author Gary Lutz: reading his A Sentence is a Lonely Place, an incisive essay on language and our facility as writers to create memorable sentences that are themselves works of art. Delectable direct quotes:

"As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself."

"The sentence is a situation of words in the most literal sense: words must be situated in relation to others to produce an enduring effect on a reader."

"These writers (of artful sentences) recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words."

"A pausing, enraptured reader should be able to look deeply into the sentence and discern among the words all of the traits and characteristics they share."

"Pretty soon in the writer’s eyes the words in the sentence are all vibrating and destabilizing themselves: no longer solid and immutable, they start to flutter this way and that in playful receptivity, taking into themselves parts of neighboring words, or shedding parts of themselves into the gutter of the page or screen; and in this process of intimate mutation and transformation, the words swap alphabetary vitals and viscera, tiny bits and dabs of their languagey inner and outer natures; the words intermingle and blend and smear and recompose themselves."

I then watched a video where Gary Lutz spoke with students at a college. Gary alluded to his habit of reading with careful attention to punctuation, most especially the placement of commas, and his frequently reading a piece of fiction starting with the last sentence and progressing backwards - this to focus on the formation of the individual sentences themselves rather than story.

And when asked if he listens to music when he writes, Gary said 'no'; rather, he puts in earplugs and wears headphones playing white noise - this to completely seal out any external noise and sound.

I mention all of the above for a specific reason: to stress when it comes to Gary Lutz, we're talking highly distinctive, idiosyncratic and quirky (in a good sense) and it's well to keep Gary's approach to writing in mind when we read his short stories.

Turning to Pulls, a seven-pager narrated in the first person by an unnamed middle-aged guy who might share a number of personality ticks with Gary, we're immediately given this bit of info:

"This wife and I had a rented house, two stories of brutal roomth. The air conditioner required a bucket underneath it. Our meals were the cheapest of meats thinly veiled."

So much revealed is so few, simple words. Of course, the most distinctive word here is 'roomth' coming from the Middle English and denoting a confined space, giving even more emphasis to 'brutal' and letting us know the digs he shared with 'this wife' proved REALLY brutal, as in suffocating, as in an emotional death trap, as in no escape unless you fled. And the two following sentences leave little doubt he and wife were scratching the bottom of society's underbelly, reduced to listening to a constant drip, drip, drip and eating crap food requiring ketchup or sauce to make it eatable, at least.

The narrator tried to steer wife to other women. He treated her and a sex starved candidate to a meal and let them go off with a gesture of good wishes. But following her fling, wife returned less than radiant. "She came home ebbing in all essences, looking explored and decreased."

You gotta love that "ebbing in all essences." Not only for the meaning of those 'e' words, ebbing denoting a decline, a decay, a fading away and essences as in the essential, enduring core of a person, but their perfect placement in the sentence carrying forth to repeat 'e' twice over: explored (oh, violated wife!) and the long 'e' in decreased that gives the ending of the sentence the power of a knockout punch.

Did the narrator swing the other way on his own fling? Yes, indeedy-do - with a boyfriend who happened to be his best friend back then. His wife was less than thrilled. The narrator goes on to share the tone for both the state of wife and his relationship with wife at the time:

"Thirty-eight years of picked-over, furying age she was - brittled hair, a bulwark forehead, a voice that sounded blown through. There were hidey-holes in whatever she said.
I felt indefinite inside of her, out of my element and unstately in my need."

In addition to his use of assonance and alliteration, Gary Lutz's breezy humor here reminds me of the master of breezy humor, minimalist Peter Cherches, when Peter writes in his Dirty Windows: "Early on in their relationship they agreed to proceed cautiously, so they hired extras to do the stunts."

Pulls contains much understated sadness. "I lived in the lonelihood of my portents and pulls." But then the unexpected: the tale's concluding short sentence. A life changer.
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Pulls can be read in Gary's short story collection, Partial List of People to Bleach, or the more recent The Complete Gary Lutz published by Tyrant Books.


American author Gary Lutz, born 1955