Gary Lutz (well, now Garielle Lutz, ever since she came out as transgender in 2021 at the age of 65, but more on that in a moment) is one of those proverbial “best writers you’ve never heard of,” a prose-stylist from another world and an Indie-lit legend. I first read Lutz’s 1996 cult-classic debut Stories in the Worst Way my starting semester of grad school, for a class on contemporary experimental literature; and while I wouldn’t say I hated it, I definitely found it off-putting at the time. With a title like that, I had naturally prepared myself for, say, tales of graphic violence, or brazen sexuality, or psychological horror or what have you–not these plot-less, epiphany-less little character sketches^[1]And I do mean sketch–Lutz’s protagonists often feel like they’re barely there.. While I could certainly appreciate the exacting precision of Lutz’s off-kilter sentences, I didn’t think mere grammar was enough to carry a story.

Yet months later, I found to my distress that it wasn’t Carol Maso or Ben Marcus or Lydia Davis or Kathy Acker I kept recurrently revisiting from that grad class, but Lutz. Those sentences, which seemed too slight and too-clever-by-half at first, just had the strangest way of getting under my skin, in a way that ostensibly more provocative writers did not. I mean, just look at some of those story titles: “I Was In Kilter with Him, a Little”; “Her Dear Only Father’s Lone Wife’s Solitudinized, Peaceless Son”; “The Smell of How the World Had Ground Itself into Somebody Else”; “To Whom Might I Have Concerned?”^[2]It is perhaps worth noting that, in addition to experiencing gender dysphoria, Lutz was also late-in-life diagnosed as high-functioning autistic; and as someone with autistic family members myself, I … Continue reading Every last sentence Lutz writes is possessed of that same level of inventiveness. To this day, anytime I start to think I’m becoming a pretty good writer, I go re-read Lutz and am immediately humbled. With a sigh, I slowly came to realize that I was going to have to read every other story Lutz had written, too.

Which turned out to not be that much^[3]In contrast to all those manifold MFA grads who churn out stories and submissions at a desperate pace for the vast, ephemeral ecosystem of Indie-lit journals, Lutz has been the polar opposite of … Continue reading. There was only the slightly-longer 2003 collection I Looked Alive, the slightly-shorter 2011 collection Divorcer, and the two chapbooks Partial List of People to Bleach (2007) and Assisted Living (2017)–all of which are collected together^[4]Along with the usual assortment of “previously-unpublished” pieces. in The Complete Gary Lutz, put out by Tyrant Books in 2019.

Lutz then promptly undercut that collection by releasing Worsted in 2021^[5]Likely to the annoyance of Tyrant Books. when she came out as transgender, which title feels like a direct call-back to her debut Stories in the Worst Way–as a way to announce a whole other sort of debut–but now I am getting beyond the scope of this article.^[6]Although I can’t help but speculate that (and I’m hardly the first to note this) if the sentences in Worsted feel so much more straight-forward than Lutz’s previously work, perhaps … Continue reading

For now at least, I’d just like to highlight that the introduction to The Complete Gary Lutz is written by none other than Brian Evenson.

To LDS writers of a certain age and stripe, the name of Brian Evenson will set off some pretty significant bells: former professor of creative writing at BYU, forced to resign in 1995 when his own graphically-violent debut collection Altmann’s Tongue^[7]Ironically, this was much more the type of story-collection I was expecting when I first picked up Stories in the Worst Way. was reported by an anonymous grad student to Church higher-ups. He left the Church himself by 2000; and though he eventually landed on his feet at Brown, his case became a cause célèbre among those critical of BYU’s restricted academic freedom.

I am not here to referee or re-litigate the Brian Evenson controversy^[8]For whatever it’s worth: I am profoundly opposed to CES’s incessant and counter-productive attempts to police the sacred free agency of its faculty, even as I also acknowledge that an … Continue reading. Rather (and more modestly), I would like to briefly examine how, exactly, Evenson chooses to praise Lutz.

The title of his introduction is simply, significantly: “Lutz Will Always Escape.” His opening anecdote concerns a conference he once attended of French translators–ones who regularly translate such difficult writers as Thomas Pynchon, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Foster Wallace, and Evenson himself–who all agreed that Lutz is by far the most impossible American writer to translate. “Technically I could translate it,” one translator told Evenson, “I did translate several pages of it. But, then, rereading it, I realized it had, somehow, when I wasn’t looking, escaped. Then I retranslated those pages a different way. Still it was gone. I could try again, but no. Lutz will always escape.”

Such is the theme that Evenson latches onto to describe the fiction of Lutz–which is curious, because of all the words that might pop into one’s head to try and pin-down Lutz’s fiction, “escape” feels pretty far down the list. These stories are certainly not “escapist” fantasy in any traditional sense. To the contrary: though there is often dry-humor here^[9]“She shot me a stay-thither look” always gets a snort out of me., Lutz’s stories are almost uniformly populated by psychological paralytics, depressives, and dissociative loners existing unremarkably on the least-romantic^[10]Lutz is from Pittsburgh, natch. margins of society–people who are listless, lonely, stuck, fatally awkward and alienated from their families, friends, co-workers, and themselves. “I got on with their lives” is how one story ends; “Then years had their say” ends another; “I wish I could inhabit my life instead of just trespassing on it” reads a third; “Sometimes people are too close to call” a fourth. In any given Lutz story, you are simultaneously enthralled by the sentences and kinda bummed out by the characters. You do not read these stories to pump yourself up. These people are hopeless; they are isolated; they are trapped.

Yet Evenson reads Lutz as escaping! Maybe not, like, Andy Dufrane at the end of The Shawshank Redemption-level escaping, but still somehow evading the nets and systems that would entrap her and pin her down into a single body or circumstance. And to be clear: I like this reading of Lutz! I’m attracted to it. It makes me wonder where Evenson got it from.

The obvious armchair speculation is that Evenson is already predisposed to seek readings of escape in situations of apparent hopelessness and loneliness due to his formative experiences with BYU–another scenario wherein a circumstance of isolation and entrapment became instead an avenue for personal escape and liberation (at least professionally). Or perhaps when Evenson defended the violence in Altmann’s Tongue to BYU administrators by arguing that his fiction “accentuated violence to show its horror and thus allow it to be condemned,” he was actually being serious! Maybe that wasn’t a post-hoc rationalization at all, and Evenson really does feel that literature of hopelessness paradoxically possesses the keys to its own escape and liberation^[11]Because what else is escape for but liberation. within the discursivity of the text itself. Who knows!

Or for that matter, maybe when Evenson asserted post-2000 that he “maintains a measure of respect for devout believers in the LDS Church and does not intend to casually offend or provoke them”, he is in fact being entirely serious there as well! Because whether one subscribes to it or not, there is indeed an ethos of escape endemic to LDS theology: escape from the first and second death (the physical and the spiritual); escape from Babylon and the World (however you care to define those); escape from the limits of our own frail mortal probation. We are simultaneously taught in our most sacred scripture that “Man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed”^[12]Moses 1:10 and even “less than the dust of the earth”^[13]Mosiah 4:2, yet that we are also the literal children of God, destined to be exalted as Gods in the distant eternities^[14]Moses 1:39. But it’s not just that we are simultaneously lower than the dust and children of God; no, our very lowness is imbricated with our exaltation! We are (like Christ) exalted because we are made low: hence why the low shall be made high, “every valley shall be exalted”^[15]Isaiah 40:4 and the last shall be first. This was the doctrine that Evenson was raised on, and which he apparently brings to his reading of The Complete Gary Lutz.

Perhaps in that sense, it is not just Lutz who will always escape, but all of us.