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Divorcer
Fiction. DIVORCER is a collection of seven harrowing and hyperprecise short stories about ruinous relationships and their aftershocks.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
117 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2011
9 people are currently reading
798 people want to read
About the author
Garielle Lutz
16 books193 followersGarielle 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
December 19, 2011
The story "To Whom Might I Have Concerned" is a prime example of the classic Lutz style (sample sentence: "After college: an unenduring, stopgap marriage {he was overhumanized, always prompt in returning any reasonable farewell crackle of affection}, then employment, and co-workers, mostly women my own life-poisoning age, mostly Kristens or Kirstens or Kirsties: the shouts of violet in their eyeshadow, their moody maneuverings between men."). It's like Lutz has turned the volume on his style up to 11 in this collection. The whole book is like guitar amps catching on fire, like stereo speakers getting blown out, over and over. The sentences are so carefully crazed, so acrobatic, I can almost see Lutz, crouched over his keyboard, revising and revising, with a devilish grin (if you can imagine this shy author smiling at all).
The result is a suite of narratives that are as refreshingly funny as they are emotionally eviscerating. Linked by themes of broken relationships and mistrustful lovers, Lutz's newest stories are full of descriptions and observations so bitter and dark that they're hilariously charred.
One of my favorite moments in the book comes (in the title story) when a tax man starts saying things like, "Do you always talk like you have a shade drawn down over your voice?" and "So, Mister Man, what would be a very nice last straw?" Some readers might raise a red flag and say you're not supposed to make your characters speak in the same refined style of the narration, but to me it felt more like a magic trick than a pretension. I laughed out loud, surprised and aghast.
*some of this review was used as the intro for my mini-interview with Lutz at the Rumpus. Read that here: http://therumpus.net/2011/09/the-rump...
The result is a suite of narratives that are as refreshingly funny as they are emotionally eviscerating. Linked by themes of broken relationships and mistrustful lovers, Lutz's newest stories are full of descriptions and observations so bitter and dark that they're hilariously charred.
One of my favorite moments in the book comes (in the title story) when a tax man starts saying things like, "Do you always talk like you have a shade drawn down over your voice?" and "So, Mister Man, what would be a very nice last straw?" Some readers might raise a red flag and say you're not supposed to make your characters speak in the same refined style of the narration, but to me it felt more like a magic trick than a pretension. I laughed out loud, surprised and aghast.
*some of this review was used as the intro for my mini-interview with Lutz at the Rumpus. Read that here: http://therumpus.net/2011/09/the-rump...
May 5, 2018
Gary Lutz can become a problem. His sentences are legendary, even in Hell, and they can take possession of you. Before you know it, you’re dropping clunkers where he paved hot asphalt. Or something like that. DIVORCER is a collection of stories about marriage and its end. But with Lutz the real story is at the sentence level, where he labors over each odd word until it clicks like a superglued Lego piece. It was a bit bothersome at first for me, the odd word choices, the strange syntax and complexity for seemingly no reason other than being different. Then come the jokes, dark but funny little phrases or ideas or throw-offs. For a depressing topic there’s a lot of humor here, in that making someone laugh is usually the result of tilting the perspective, at which Lutz is a master. These stories are obviously not driven by plot or characters, though they’re seasoned with both, but rather by sentences, one after the other, which build another kind of story. It’s not the kind they teach you in school, but it’s the kind the mind creates with language, which makes these off-center tales more realistic than realism, which is not real. Lutz is a standup comic, who might be a poet, erecting worlds as strange as any science-fiction fantasy while remaining familiar. I’m reminded of nightmares I had that scared me, but when I relate them to others after I wake up, they laugh in hysterics. That’s could be a metaphor for life or Lutz.
November 18, 2024
*3.5 rounded up
“..𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘧𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴, 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘱𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘧𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘶𝘵.”
Concerns itself with the way we are perceived, lonely and all, when in a relationship. If marriage is the sealed search of the other half, what if the other half isn’t exactly who you imagined your other half to be? In the wrong kind of way? What if it was all a mistake? And from whose love are we being perceived from to fall into these mistakes?
Whimsical with sentences that make you squirm. With delight. With wonder. With question marks. Sentences sling far back into the brain, sometimes focusing on the odd ways the body moves, to spit out perceptions and voices in ways you didn’t think could be possible. Reading Lutz is like learning language all over again when you vaguely know all the words, vaguely know the world you’ve been living in. With Lutz, I’ve forgotten if I’ve done it right or alright or if there is matter to any of the living I’ve done at all.
“𝘞𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘳𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮.”
“..𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘧𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴, 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘱𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵’𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘧𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘶𝘵.”
Concerns itself with the way we are perceived, lonely and all, when in a relationship. If marriage is the sealed search of the other half, what if the other half isn’t exactly who you imagined your other half to be? In the wrong kind of way? What if it was all a mistake? And from whose love are we being perceived from to fall into these mistakes?
Whimsical with sentences that make you squirm. With delight. With wonder. With question marks. Sentences sling far back into the brain, sometimes focusing on the odd ways the body moves, to spit out perceptions and voices in ways you didn’t think could be possible. Reading Lutz is like learning language all over again when you vaguely know all the words, vaguely know the world you’ve been living in. With Lutz, I’ve forgotten if I’ve done it right or alright or if there is matter to any of the living I’ve done at all.
“𝘞𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘳𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮.”
May 31, 2025
“…it was one unexalting night or another toward the end of that second year, and we were having it out…she had me mostly right (‘failures of empathy,’ ‘vengeful withdrawals’), and my conscience must have had other polyps on it, tumoral guilts and disgraces, because we were together only grittier after that, and then came newer pivots and revolts in her loyalty to me, pairings I might have even put her up to myself.
If people say the marriage was a passing thing, what they mean is that it shot right past us. We couldn't keep up.
…she would return to our table at the restaurant after taking forever in the restroom and say, ‘I think there might be somebody crying in there.’”
What more can I say.
If people say the marriage was a passing thing, what they mean is that it shot right past us. We couldn't keep up.
…she would return to our table at the restaurant after taking forever in the restroom and say, ‘I think there might be somebody crying in there.’”
What more can I say.
August 12, 2014
Lutz prose is a sort of off-balancing act which you find, upon reading for the first time, utterly nourishing - like eating a new food that provides you with some long deficient mineral. The turning is at one pause funny, like the term, “keepsake pornography”; at another wise, as in, “You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.”; and at others sublimely pregnant, as when the female narrator of one story says, “What had shaped me was the discovery, at thirteen, that I could send my arm around my back and then make out, at my side, the fingers of a hand doing its damnedest to reach me.” Recommended for those with an untapped penchant for a little misconstruing.
April 17, 2012
Gary Lutz comes up often as one of the most important "new" writers out there, pushing the boundaries of what we expect fiction to do, etc. etc. Specifically, he's praised for his sentences, which absolutely never take the turns you expect. So I had to find out for myself.
And it's true: The story "Middleton" begins: "For one reason or another my wife, a baby-talking, all but uninterpreted woman only a couple of years older than I, died in one of those commuter-plane crashes that reporters were never sure what to do about. It happened on a day when the third of three famous people in a row had finally died, in this case some moody entertainer, and no one aboard the plane could have been anything other than worn out and morbid to begin with, and anyway my wife was not even a commuter: she had been flying across state to visit a stepsister, somebody more sturdy, who had taken sick after some apparently recreational uncertainty about a newly glued upper tooth."
What's going on here? The rules of grammar are more or less followed, but this is more than a fine-tuned plunge into Markov chains. There's a narrative, a character, a voice. Lutz extracts the unspoken-but-more-accurate adjective from the tip of his character's tongue, but he (the author-function Lutz, or the narrator?) is also playing with sound (the sturdy stepsister, the newly glued tooth). The cultural context (plane crashes, celebrity deaths) is subject to unbelief, but a kind of participatory unbelief, an attached irony: you cannot touch that dial. A big part of the story this voice is telling is the voice that is telling the story.
But is it really a story? The seven pieces in Divorcer are all about failed relationships, all told in the first person (though some as a woman, some as a man, some straight, some gay), all in the literary past tense. I don't think there are seven distinct characters or voices, though. In the middle of "I Have to Feel Halved" we get the sentence: "He was laid up the while I knew him, but his symptoms lacked a guiding disease." Again it's the too-accurately-deployed lumpen speech, again it's the cable-channel POV. I forget what gender made that sentence, and the sentence won't tell me.
Words near the end of "Womanesque" disclose Lutz's sidelong explanation: "These days, I launder anything before I say it. I make sure there's something still sudsing between the words." The book's title might suggest it will help a reader understand how human relationships end, but these characters and their relationships are simply material for laundering, occasions for sentences. Things stick together or bubble up unexpectedly in life as in language, and divorces are as good a situation as any and better than most for making that point. But the point is mostly about the language, not the life.
And it's true: The story "Middleton" begins: "For one reason or another my wife, a baby-talking, all but uninterpreted woman only a couple of years older than I, died in one of those commuter-plane crashes that reporters were never sure what to do about. It happened on a day when the third of three famous people in a row had finally died, in this case some moody entertainer, and no one aboard the plane could have been anything other than worn out and morbid to begin with, and anyway my wife was not even a commuter: she had been flying across state to visit a stepsister, somebody more sturdy, who had taken sick after some apparently recreational uncertainty about a newly glued upper tooth."
What's going on here? The rules of grammar are more or less followed, but this is more than a fine-tuned plunge into Markov chains. There's a narrative, a character, a voice. Lutz extracts the unspoken-but-more-accurate adjective from the tip of his character's tongue, but he (the author-function Lutz, or the narrator?) is also playing with sound (the sturdy stepsister, the newly glued tooth). The cultural context (plane crashes, celebrity deaths) is subject to unbelief, but a kind of participatory unbelief, an attached irony: you cannot touch that dial. A big part of the story this voice is telling is the voice that is telling the story.
But is it really a story? The seven pieces in Divorcer are all about failed relationships, all told in the first person (though some as a woman, some as a man, some straight, some gay), all in the literary past tense. I don't think there are seven distinct characters or voices, though. In the middle of "I Have to Feel Halved" we get the sentence: "He was laid up the while I knew him, but his symptoms lacked a guiding disease." Again it's the too-accurately-deployed lumpen speech, again it's the cable-channel POV. I forget what gender made that sentence, and the sentence won't tell me.
Words near the end of "Womanesque" disclose Lutz's sidelong explanation: "These days, I launder anything before I say it. I make sure there's something still sudsing between the words." The book's title might suggest it will help a reader understand how human relationships end, but these characters and their relationships are simply material for laundering, occasions for sentences. Things stick together or bubble up unexpectedly in life as in language, and divorces are as good a situation as any and better than most for making that point. But the point is mostly about the language, not the life.
August 20, 2021
Video review https://youtu.be/auCn4mmpkcQ
April 10, 2019
I have said probable things about Gary Lutz and I reassert them now. Short and sharp, like verbal acupuncture, but neither quick nor sweet. The best spleen brews into a savory cud. Lutz's incontestable mastery presides over the observational sentence, transforming rather than merely expressing both perception and language, adumbrating a life, a world, in a handful of choicest words. A balmsman for the maladjusted, the irregularizing, closeted alpha-pussies.
December 30, 2025
A strong 3.5!
In the very best way, Garielle Lutz’s sentences read like perfectly crafted Mad Libs. These stories all follow a pretty similar narrative arc— a weird relationship is falling / has fallen apart— but the eccentricity of each situation is matched and surpassed by the bizarreness of Lutz’s storytelling. Her prose is jarring, bendy, and intriguing, with a very peculiar and particular flow. Each of these stories contains a lot of ridiculousness as well as some really striking moments. I really like how Lutz captures the feeling of disidentification, feeling hardly present in your own life. I enjoyed this collection a lot, but maybe didn’t click with it as much as I could’ve because it’s all about divorce and, well, that just isn’t very presently on my mind right now. Definitely a writer to keep my eye on though. Favorite stories were: “Fathering” “Middleton” and “Womanesque.”
In the very best way, Garielle Lutz’s sentences read like perfectly crafted Mad Libs. These stories all follow a pretty similar narrative arc— a weird relationship is falling / has fallen apart— but the eccentricity of each situation is matched and surpassed by the bizarreness of Lutz’s storytelling. Her prose is jarring, bendy, and intriguing, with a very peculiar and particular flow. Each of these stories contains a lot of ridiculousness as well as some really striking moments. I really like how Lutz captures the feeling of disidentification, feeling hardly present in your own life. I enjoyed this collection a lot, but maybe didn’t click with it as much as I could’ve because it’s all about divorce and, well, that just isn’t very presently on my mind right now. Definitely a writer to keep my eye on though. Favorite stories were: “Fathering” “Middleton” and “Womanesque.”
January 1, 2021
Updates, as well, about her sisters, the unharnessed two of them, the one’s heart galloping toward the others in the attic they still shared in their late, paddocked twenties.
Or the two of us again in our domestic spectacle, a day already profaning itself into furthermore of yesterday: over and over, all I had done was say, “There, I’ve said it” though it would leave me feeling only exposed, not unmasked.
My third book by Lutz and while not my favorite, there were great moments. The stories tend to be longer, the characters able to be with us for longer. I hesitate to say more fleshed out because that’s really not the goal here. Once again, Lutz delivers with his well-crafted sentences. Like other collections, the stories and the characters, feelings, and sentences therein are all muddled together. Divorcer contained 7 stories but thinking back to them its hard to differentiate most of them. As the collections name suggests, these are stories of couples falling part (if they were even together in the first place) and divorcing. Listless middle-aged men and women with partners half their ages living in small cities. The apathetic, matter of fact, approach to the writing made them feel like light reading until I really thought about how they were emotionally heavy. The stories are quite gray. Not quite depressing but definitely not cheerful. I often found myself wanting to read more but was just not up to it.
Or the two of us again in our domestic spectacle, a day already profaning itself into furthermore of yesterday: over and over, all I had done was say, “There, I’ve said it” though it would leave me feeling only exposed, not unmasked.
My third book by Lutz and while not my favorite, there were great moments. The stories tend to be longer, the characters able to be with us for longer. I hesitate to say more fleshed out because that’s really not the goal here. Once again, Lutz delivers with his well-crafted sentences. Like other collections, the stories and the characters, feelings, and sentences therein are all muddled together. Divorcer contained 7 stories but thinking back to them its hard to differentiate most of them. As the collections name suggests, these are stories of couples falling part (if they were even together in the first place) and divorcing. Listless middle-aged men and women with partners half their ages living in small cities. The apathetic, matter of fact, approach to the writing made them feel like light reading until I really thought about how they were emotionally heavy. The stories are quite gray. Not quite depressing but definitely not cheerful. I often found myself wanting to read more but was just not up to it.
September 10, 2012
Ahhh was this book hard to read. Style just takes Content and beats him up like it's nobody's business. Slashes his face like the Mob. Plot-blood splatters newly-printed pages in a million little red continents.
I enjoyed the writing of the short stories, but the stories themselves? I would give them a 1/5. Lutz just doesn't give a shit about linking all of his little gems into some kind of coherent jewel. I disliked so many of the things he did that made his plots seem dishonest and artificial and so damn unrealistic. Uch, I was so frustrated so much of the time, more than I was stunned (the writing is wondrous, a frontier-pusher, but still!)
For my fiction class, I guess the book looks like it could be a good teacher of good writing, but bad fiction.
I enjoyed the writing of the short stories, but the stories themselves? I would give them a 1/5. Lutz just doesn't give a shit about linking all of his little gems into some kind of coherent jewel. I disliked so many of the things he did that made his plots seem dishonest and artificial and so damn unrealistic. Uch, I was so frustrated so much of the time, more than I was stunned (the writing is wondrous, a frontier-pusher, but still!)
For my fiction class, I guess the book looks like it could be a good teacher of good writing, but bad fiction.
November 13, 2015
80% of the time: "Wow, I've never read someone describe things in such idiosyncratic fashion, fuck yeah!"
20% of the time: "Wow, I've never read someone describe things in such idiosyncratic fashion, fuck this!"
20% of the time: "Wow, I've never read someone describe things in such idiosyncratic fashion, fuck this!"
May 12, 2012
lutz' best, most human work.
May 19, 2020
It's a short collection and I don't know if I could take more than 100-odd pages of Lutz in one book. The style is distinctive and arcane (Brian Evenson referred to him as 'The Only Untranslatable American Writer') and there's a lot of pleasure to be taken from the unexpected vocabulary and sentence formations. Plotwise the stories are loose (although the collection has a common thread of relationships and break ups, as indicated by the title) and there is a touch of Barthelme in the absurdities. I'll read more Lutz but probably not soon.
February 20, 2022
Lutz’s style is refreshing, ruthless, full of humor and brutal depression all at once. The voice of one story is practically imperceptibly different from the voices of the other stories. I found myself frequently laughing out loud, texting favorite sentences to friends. Also, bc Lutz is so singular in voice, it’s much like listening to the music of Roscoe Holcomb or Skip James — so intense that you can only really take it in little bits, but when you do they are minute overwhelming masterpieces.
June 12, 2021
No one strings together words, or even the semblance of words, into sentences in as uniquely original and highly identifiable a way as Gary Lutz. No one. Sometimes to the detriment of the understanding of the sentence, but always so bold and uncharted.
November 7, 2024
«She was my wife of five months going on five years ago. Things hadn't lasted even long enough for people I hadn't seen all that while to have started looking a little like other people. I wouldn't know how to go about looking for any of them now.»
November 29, 2024
read this fucked up beautiful and very queer short story collection printed in Middletown DE while visiting my family in Middletown DE. And all the chaos and venom of these sentences makes perfect sense…
“Any worthy sorrow came with a catch: you had to have asked for it.”
“Any worthy sorrow came with a catch: you had to have asked for it.”
May 10, 2019
Amazing. Will make you a better train passenger.
October 28, 2021
Reading Garielle Lutz rewires your brain.
'Divorcer' is Lutz queering and subverting the classic American domestic/marriage/divorce fiction tropes, rendering the genre eviscerated and born anew.
'Divorcer' is Lutz queering and subverting the classic American domestic/marriage/divorce fiction tropes, rendering the genre eviscerated and born anew.
September 12, 2024
Inhumanly perfect.
November 8, 2011
"Gary Lutz’s books know what it is like to see parents split. His first collection Stories in the Worst Way was originally released from Knopf in 1996, later adopted by 3rd Bed, and then when they went quiet, Derek White of Calamari Press picked it up for a 2009 re-issue. Lutz’s second collection I Looked Alive saw the same tumult: published first by Four Walls Eight Windows and then re-issued just this past year by Black Square Editions. Even the tiny Future Tense chapbook of rare and early Lutz stories A Partial List of People to Bleach was a combination of reprints and work previously available in The Quarterly. But what is unique about divorcer, the fourth collection from one of the most touted indie press short story writers, is that it pushes a thematic connection throughout the entire book, something not done in any of the previous collections, and one would hope that this, in additional to all the other merits of divorcer, will keep it from being one more book-child example of Lutz’s literary-separations."
Read the full review in The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2011/11/irreconc...
Read the full review in The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2011/11/irreconc...
March 15, 2016
There is certainly potential in the writing of this author, but he insists on trying to sound too intelligent and "deep", totally ruining what talent he has.
I couldn't tell if these were separated short stories or connected, because the voice is the exact same throughout. The "show don't tell" rule is totally lost on all of these. Oftentimes the vignettes within the story don't do it for me, and often the more or less irrelevant characters that make an appearance for a moment would be a great short story on their own, far better than these characters. Also, the story in the pov of a woman I just don't believe--not that all women have the same voice, not that I believe in a gender binary, but it feels utterly false.
I have dog eared a number of pages for their shear silliness so that I can read them aloud later.
I couldn't tell if these were separated short stories or connected, because the voice is the exact same throughout. The "show don't tell" rule is totally lost on all of these. Oftentimes the vignettes within the story don't do it for me, and often the more or less irrelevant characters that make an appearance for a moment would be a great short story on their own, far better than these characters. Also, the story in the pov of a woman I just don't believe--not that all women have the same voice, not that I believe in a gender binary, but it feels utterly false.
I have dog eared a number of pages for their shear silliness so that I can read them aloud later.
June 18, 2012
When I read Gary Lutz I feel like someone is hacking away minute slices of my brain with a cold, stainless steel chisel.
The stories in Divorcer are longer than the ones in Stories in the Worst Way. I found myself taking frequent breaks from section to section. Lutz doesn't give a shit about the canon, clearly, which is refreshing. He just swings through the dense jungle of his stories on his sentence ropes. He's entirely unexpected. And quite rude, in an admirable way.
Reading him changes me, and that's what good fiction is supposed to do.
The stories in Divorcer are longer than the ones in Stories in the Worst Way. I found myself taking frequent breaks from section to section. Lutz doesn't give a shit about the canon, clearly, which is refreshing. He just swings through the dense jungle of his stories on his sentence ropes. He's entirely unexpected. And quite rude, in an admirable way.
Reading him changes me, and that's what good fiction is supposed to do.
December 1, 2011
As a sentence-lover, I found this book to be some kind of painstaking utopia. There is no less suffering in the lives of the characters than there is in the reader sorting through these stunning accomplishments in what seems like "word salad" but is most definitely a word feast. More writing should challenge and enthrall like Lutz's does. This one is a boggler and a triumph.
April 18, 2012
My god, the sentences, THE SENTENCES. A book about divorce should feel like breaking; it should feel like tiny apocalypses. Gary Lutz makes his words spiky, his sentences painful, and full of anger, betrayal. A little bit of these people's shared lives dies in awful, mundane ways, and he captures how every little death looks, and how it feels.
October 6, 2011
Lutz's stories are always really just a scaffolding upon which to lay his amazingly thorny, totally unpredictable and irony soaked sentences. A deeply witty and amusing satirist, Lutz is utterly unique and Divorcer puts his talents on full display.
July 20, 2016
prose that is squelchy, squishy, and warm with musty humanity like a recently vacated leather easy chair. narratives of privates unhappinesses, blundered relationships and general misuse. these stories would be unbearable to live, but they are quite wonderful to read.
discontinued-reading
November 30, 2014too much like ashbery while doggedly attempting (some semblance of?) narrative sense. a noble but failed experiment.
Read
July 10, 2012Master of the oddwise adverbjective.
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