What do you think?
Rate this book
Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton
Fiction. Operating somewhere between fiction and poetry, biography and theory, the stories in ATTEMPTS AT A LIFE do what lively stories do best, creating worlds of possibility, worlds filled with surprises. Like the "experiments in found movement" one character conducts (in "Everybody's Autobiography"), Dutton's stories find movement wherever they turn, each sentence a small explosion of images and anthems and odd juxtapositions. This is writing in which the imagination (both writer's and reader's) is capable of producing almost anything at any moment, from a shiny penny to an alien metropolis, a burning village to a bright green bird. "Danielle Dutton's stories remind me of those alluring puzzles where the pool is overflowing and emptying at the same time. Dutton's answer? That the self is a rush of the languages of storytelling and moments of helpless intimacy"--Robert Gluck.
Paperback
First published March 15, 2007
6 people are currently reading
493 people want to read
About the author
Danielle Dutton
15 books152 followersDanielle Dutton's fiction has appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper's, BOMB, The Paris Review, The White Review, Conjunctions, Guernica, and NOON. She is the author of Attempts at a Life, which Daniel Handler in Entertainment Weekly called "indescribably beautiful"; SPRAWL, a finalist for the Believer Book Award in 2011, reprinted by Wave Books with an Afterword by Renee Gladman in 2018; Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, a book of collages by Richard Kraft; and the novel Margaret the First. In 2010, Dutton co-founded the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project, named for her great aunt Dorothy, a librarian who drove a bookmobile through the back hills of southern California. Over the past decade, the press has published the work of Renee Gladman, Leonora Carrington, Cristina Rivera Garza, Barbara Comyns, Jen George, Amina Cain, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Sabrina Orah Mark, Nathalie Leger, and other innovative writers.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 22, 2008
Painting under the influence of the post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne and the sculpture of Iberians who had migrated from Africa to Spain, Pablo Picasso used cubist angles in his portrait of Gertrude Stein that can signify the sharp angles of her writing. In Pablo Picasso: A Modern Master, Richard Leslie writes, “After some eighty sittings, as recorded by Stein, Picasso painted out the face in frustration and left… for the quietude of a small mountain village in Spain. Upon his return to Paris, after executing a number of paintings that summer, he was able to repaint the face of Stein without seeing her again. The result was something almost frightening to his contemporaries. Her head was now ‘Iberian,’ a mask of simplified and powerful planes which matched the physical and intellectual power of the modernist author.” [23]
Gertrude Stein used her technique of “insistence” to create similarly jarring, angular, and faux-simplistic lines in her portrait of Pablo Picasso: “This one was always having something that was coming out of this one that was a solid thing, a charming thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellent thing, a very pretty thing.” Stein believed that, “Once started expressing this thing, expressing anything there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis… A bird’s singing is perhaps the nearest thing to repetition but if you listen they too vary their insistence.” [Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, p.xxii]
Undeniably both Stein’s and Picasso’s portraiture styles have shifted the eyes and consciousness of Western viewers and readers ever since. Stein’s influence was overt in the writing of Language-associated poets (Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, and Elizabeth Robinson, to name just three), but also in the fiction of such writers as Diane Williams, Lydia Davis, Martha Ronk, and Elizabeth MacKiernan. It would seem that we are beginning to enjoy the fruits of Stein’s influence as filtered through a second generation of influences (see the above, to name just seven) combined with a strong impulse to cross generic lines. This can be seen in recent work by such younger writers as Selah Saterstrom, Nina Shope, Aimee Parkison, Joyelle McSweeney, and, with the publication of her first collection, Attempts at a Life, we can add Danielle Dutton to that list. With a dizzying turn of sentences, her use of “insistence” to create a palpable intensity, and the playful, yet precise simplicity of her word choice, Dutton’s work is the descendent of the modernist portraits by—and of—both Stein and Picasso, as handed down through Language poetry, prose poetry, and experimental fiction lineages.
Dutton’s piece, “The Portrait of a Lady,” begins with the following paragraph:
I was a tomboy and fought on open fields. The days passed unmarked and I called them: Mrs. Days. ‘She is a different child!’ I heard the women say even as they were forgetting me. And while my sisters practiced their stitches in the parlor from the light of a beaded lamp, I stood on the battlefield with what I thought was a gun in my hand, but it turned out to be a bright green bird. Thankfully, an opportunity arose to chart well-charted republics. I sailed east in front of viewers. With body erect I sniffed the air, tilted generously with numerous impressions. Someone said: ‘If there is a wound then bacteria or peroxide will take care of it one way or another.’ I heard someone say: ‘Bring your body closer. Bring up your five parts.’ But I was the dancing girl for my own army after all, and a vixen. [14]
By contrasting the “Lady” of the title with the first person revelation that the portrait’s subject was a “tomboy,” Dutton echoes Stein’s wonderfully gossipy sense of humor. The narrator’s outsider status, that of a “different child” in a household populated by sisters who “practiced their stitches in the parlor from the light of a beaded lamp,” hint to us that this narrator uses the label “lady” as both an ironic term and a title she has appropriated for herself. She is a self-described “dancing girl” and “vixen” who has traveled the world in order to “chart well-charted republics” and she has returned to bring this knowledge to her well-heeled but dull kin: a lady is a lady who says she is a lady. Additionally, Dutton’s subtle repetition of “chart” and “charted” and “bring” and “bring” in this short passage, utilize Stein’s “insistence” technique to reinforce the narrator’s progression through years and landscapes.
In section after section in Attempts at a Life, Danielle Dutton executes expert, miniscule language slips that make us slide down the surface of her narratives like raindrops streaking the windows of the last un-gentrified house in an old Victorian neighborhood. Her twelve-part “Selections from Madame Bovary” creates a counterpoint to Gustave Flaubert’s search for le mot juste by reducing his realist novel to single words and chains of words. “Part I, Chapter II” of that section reads in its entirety: “Night came: letter, rain, countryside, time. Charles turned. Emma hurried, stood. Inevitably house came weeping. For such she went, that’s why.” Compare this to Gertrude Stein’s complication of an otherwise straightforward still life of the vegetable asparagus, given here in its entirety, “Asparagus in a lean in lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet.” In The American Prose Poem, Michel Delville writes of Stein’s still lifes, “In Tender Buttons, however, Stein’s style moves away from the initial, cinematic technique of repetition-with-variation toward a more absolute form of abstractionism. While the portraits still delivered a fairly precise description of specific characterological types, it is generally impossible to relate the contents of Stein’s still lifes to the objects mentioned in their titles.” [60] Similarly, Dutton’s desire to dissemble Flaubert’s classic novel and rebuild it as a surface-oriented sequence of words and small events signals a move away from the fragmented prose poem narratives of such pieces as Jane Eyre, S & M, Everybody’s Autobiography, Or Nine Attempts at a Life, and, Alice James, towards a more absolute, uncompromising, Language-influenced mode of writing. Dutton’s take on Madame Bovary is less the literary appropriation of Kathy Acker in such work as Don Quixote and Great Expectations, and more the dynamic creative inspiration of Pablo Picasso capturing the angular vision of Gertrude Stein’s brilliant writing in a series of hard, cubist lines.
Famously, when Gertrude Stein first viewed Picasso’s portrait, her initial comment was that that it didn’t look like her. Picasso retorted, “Yes, but it will.” While Attempts at a Life may not present us with a fully formed artist, it most certainly introduces an important new literary voice.
Gertrude Stein used her technique of “insistence” to create similarly jarring, angular, and faux-simplistic lines in her portrait of Pablo Picasso: “This one was always having something that was coming out of this one that was a solid thing, a charming thing, a lovely thing, a perplexing thing, a disconcerting thing, a simple thing, a clear thing, a complicated thing, an interesting thing, a disturbing thing, a repellent thing, a very pretty thing.” Stein believed that, “Once started expressing this thing, expressing anything there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis… A bird’s singing is perhaps the nearest thing to repetition but if you listen they too vary their insistence.” [Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, p.xxii]
Undeniably both Stein’s and Picasso’s portraiture styles have shifted the eyes and consciousness of Western viewers and readers ever since. Stein’s influence was overt in the writing of Language-associated poets (Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, and Elizabeth Robinson, to name just three), but also in the fiction of such writers as Diane Williams, Lydia Davis, Martha Ronk, and Elizabeth MacKiernan. It would seem that we are beginning to enjoy the fruits of Stein’s influence as filtered through a second generation of influences (see the above, to name just seven) combined with a strong impulse to cross generic lines. This can be seen in recent work by such younger writers as Selah Saterstrom, Nina Shope, Aimee Parkison, Joyelle McSweeney, and, with the publication of her first collection, Attempts at a Life, we can add Danielle Dutton to that list. With a dizzying turn of sentences, her use of “insistence” to create a palpable intensity, and the playful, yet precise simplicity of her word choice, Dutton’s work is the descendent of the modernist portraits by—and of—both Stein and Picasso, as handed down through Language poetry, prose poetry, and experimental fiction lineages.
Dutton’s piece, “The Portrait of a Lady,” begins with the following paragraph:
I was a tomboy and fought on open fields. The days passed unmarked and I called them: Mrs. Days. ‘She is a different child!’ I heard the women say even as they were forgetting me. And while my sisters practiced their stitches in the parlor from the light of a beaded lamp, I stood on the battlefield with what I thought was a gun in my hand, but it turned out to be a bright green bird. Thankfully, an opportunity arose to chart well-charted republics. I sailed east in front of viewers. With body erect I sniffed the air, tilted generously with numerous impressions. Someone said: ‘If there is a wound then bacteria or peroxide will take care of it one way or another.’ I heard someone say: ‘Bring your body closer. Bring up your five parts.’ But I was the dancing girl for my own army after all, and a vixen. [14]
By contrasting the “Lady” of the title with the first person revelation that the portrait’s subject was a “tomboy,” Dutton echoes Stein’s wonderfully gossipy sense of humor. The narrator’s outsider status, that of a “different child” in a household populated by sisters who “practiced their stitches in the parlor from the light of a beaded lamp,” hint to us that this narrator uses the label “lady” as both an ironic term and a title she has appropriated for herself. She is a self-described “dancing girl” and “vixen” who has traveled the world in order to “chart well-charted republics” and she has returned to bring this knowledge to her well-heeled but dull kin: a lady is a lady who says she is a lady. Additionally, Dutton’s subtle repetition of “chart” and “charted” and “bring” and “bring” in this short passage, utilize Stein’s “insistence” technique to reinforce the narrator’s progression through years and landscapes.
In section after section in Attempts at a Life, Danielle Dutton executes expert, miniscule language slips that make us slide down the surface of her narratives like raindrops streaking the windows of the last un-gentrified house in an old Victorian neighborhood. Her twelve-part “Selections from Madame Bovary” creates a counterpoint to Gustave Flaubert’s search for le mot juste by reducing his realist novel to single words and chains of words. “Part I, Chapter II” of that section reads in its entirety: “Night came: letter, rain, countryside, time. Charles turned. Emma hurried, stood. Inevitably house came weeping. For such she went, that’s why.” Compare this to Gertrude Stein’s complication of an otherwise straightforward still life of the vegetable asparagus, given here in its entirety, “Asparagus in a lean in lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet.” In The American Prose Poem, Michel Delville writes of Stein’s still lifes, “In Tender Buttons, however, Stein’s style moves away from the initial, cinematic technique of repetition-with-variation toward a more absolute form of abstractionism. While the portraits still delivered a fairly precise description of specific characterological types, it is generally impossible to relate the contents of Stein’s still lifes to the objects mentioned in their titles.” [60] Similarly, Dutton’s desire to dissemble Flaubert’s classic novel and rebuild it as a surface-oriented sequence of words and small events signals a move away from the fragmented prose poem narratives of such pieces as Jane Eyre, S & M, Everybody’s Autobiography, Or Nine Attempts at a Life, and, Alice James, towards a more absolute, uncompromising, Language-influenced mode of writing. Dutton’s take on Madame Bovary is less the literary appropriation of Kathy Acker in such work as Don Quixote and Great Expectations, and more the dynamic creative inspiration of Pablo Picasso capturing the angular vision of Gertrude Stein’s brilliant writing in a series of hard, cubist lines.
Famously, when Gertrude Stein first viewed Picasso’s portrait, her initial comment was that that it didn’t look like her. Picasso retorted, “Yes, but it will.” While Attempts at a Life may not present us with a fully formed artist, it most certainly introduces an important new literary voice.
November 2, 2007
brilliant, various, funny, endless--wonderful and good, too.
August 11, 2008
How exciting that I am related to this author, that she is the aunt to my two children, my sister!
September 4, 2024
It’s advisable that you start the record of a life knowing the most important things that need to be said. The authority to say just those things. The foresight to let nothing you don’t know affect everything you definitely know. Then flatten that out. Make flattening information a sculptural activity. Because information about a life, a story where you attempt to encompass a life or to encapsulate a life or to just give the reader a feel for a woman living her life with its priorities, its pleasures, its attentions, this is not something that’s actually suited to the language you expect it to be assembled into. But sometimes it will get close. It’s such a foregone conclusion, life.
Dutton’s book makes me feel like when I’m reading Madame Bovary (from the portion of this book providing a version of Flaubert’s book, maybe Dutton feels this way, too!), and I think the author is just so over writing anything about this woman. It’s so predictable. Obviously, we knew what her life would amount to. The Flaubert narrator says to us while winking off-handedly. Maybe not as extremely as Dutton’s “Madame Bovary” lays out. Or I don’t see the tenor of Dutton’s book overall being like the spiky retelling she offers of Bovary. I would characterize it more as her retelling of “Jane Eyre.” Like, do we really need the hundreds of pages SOME PEOPLE use to tell this story? We already knew what’ would happen. Story of a woman, the woman meets a man, they wed.
It’s the like the contours of a life running along the template many people will call “life.” But, then, the question I perceive in this book: what do you do when the template for life was all along formed by men? And the men could point to that template and argue that if a woman’s life wasn’t following the template, maybe the woman’s not having much of a life. It appears a tidy logic men can use to look past the lives of the women in some relation to them. And maybe the book’s “attempts” to record a life, and the chaotic logic that impels the writing forward is a comment on the many aspects of life that could have been included. So, for instance, “attempts” that include references to romance or desire as informational more than locus of events. Not that the information can’t be interesting. But that the romance doesn’t need to suck every other event into its sphere of influence.
Dutton’s book makes me feel like when I’m reading Madame Bovary (from the portion of this book providing a version of Flaubert’s book, maybe Dutton feels this way, too!), and I think the author is just so over writing anything about this woman. It’s so predictable. Obviously, we knew what her life would amount to. The Flaubert narrator says to us while winking off-handedly. Maybe not as extremely as Dutton’s “Madame Bovary” lays out. Or I don’t see the tenor of Dutton’s book overall being like the spiky retelling she offers of Bovary. I would characterize it more as her retelling of “Jane Eyre.” Like, do we really need the hundreds of pages SOME PEOPLE use to tell this story? We already knew what’ would happen. Story of a woman, the woman meets a man, they wed.
It’s the like the contours of a life running along the template many people will call “life.” But, then, the question I perceive in this book: what do you do when the template for life was all along formed by men? And the men could point to that template and argue that if a woman’s life wasn’t following the template, maybe the woman’s not having much of a life. It appears a tidy logic men can use to look past the lives of the women in some relation to them. And maybe the book’s “attempts” to record a life, and the chaotic logic that impels the writing forward is a comment on the many aspects of life that could have been included. So, for instance, “attempts” that include references to romance or desire as informational more than locus of events. Not that the information can’t be interesting. But that the romance doesn’t need to suck every other event into its sphere of influence.
Read
June 23, 2025i love authors like dutton because they are so well read , dripping with references from all the greatest artists . . woven with her own strange magic . reading breeds the sexiest people i swear
my fave reference she uses is from robert duncan
“ i see her in willows , in fog , at the river of sound in the trees “
my fave reference she uses is from robert duncan
“ i see her in willows , in fog , at the river of sound in the trees “
April 14, 2012
I'm not always sure what Danielle Dutton is doing in these seventeen experiments, but it's still a lot of fun to watch. I don't call them stories, because some of them don't quite cohere narratively—sometimes they miss by a mile—and that's clearly not the point. It's something instead at the level of the sentence, more a poetics than anything else.
One of the sections of "Everybody's Autobiography, or Nine Attempts at a Life" begins "My husband was born in 1887 in Germany after World War I": even within the sentence things don't cohere. But the entire story hangs together as a cubist view of the lives of (never numbered, never named) modern artists, and that's a sort of cubism at the level of the sentence. The title alludes to Gertrude Stein, but since I've never read her I can't say whether Dutton is mimicking or responding to her. Probably both.
"Selections from Madame Bovary" seems to use a technique more like erasure, but radical: the book is reduced to less than a thousand words. And yet those words are enough to hint at not just Flaubert's original, but a particular reading of it. In Part I we get "Partner-swaying to violinist's doorways, to pale low gentleman. Spanish curtain and violin." Part II: "Boring—completely—Madame was there." And Part III: "Close-fitting spineless love." (I'm erasing further by selecting these samples from Dutton's selection.) As Grant Cogswell said of Marion Zioncheck's suicide note, you miss the syntax but you get the passion.
"Hester Prynne," though, is a straightforward internal monologue that begins "I sit and watch a ship creak under its burden. Months might pass until I hear that another has sunk, popping from its fittings, flailing through darkness, breaking up under cover of sea. But I have a daughter and she is rare as anything." What's subversive here is the content of Hester's thoughts, which range far outside of any context we're given in The Scarlet Letter.
It's like Dutton is calibrating the scope or range of an instrument. While it seems to be some sort of scientific instrument, it turns out to make music too.
One of the sections of "Everybody's Autobiography, or Nine Attempts at a Life" begins "My husband was born in 1887 in Germany after World War I": even within the sentence things don't cohere. But the entire story hangs together as a cubist view of the lives of (never numbered, never named) modern artists, and that's a sort of cubism at the level of the sentence. The title alludes to Gertrude Stein, but since I've never read her I can't say whether Dutton is mimicking or responding to her. Probably both.
"Selections from Madame Bovary" seems to use a technique more like erasure, but radical: the book is reduced to less than a thousand words. And yet those words are enough to hint at not just Flaubert's original, but a particular reading of it. In Part I we get "Partner-swaying to violinist's doorways, to pale low gentleman. Spanish curtain and violin." Part II: "Boring—completely—Madame was there." And Part III: "Close-fitting spineless love." (I'm erasing further by selecting these samples from Dutton's selection.) As Grant Cogswell said of Marion Zioncheck's suicide note, you miss the syntax but you get the passion.
"Hester Prynne," though, is a straightforward internal monologue that begins "I sit and watch a ship creak under its burden. Months might pass until I hear that another has sunk, popping from its fittings, flailing through darkness, breaking up under cover of sea. But I have a daughter and she is rare as anything." What's subversive here is the content of Hester's thoughts, which range far outside of any context we're given in The Scarlet Letter.
It's like Dutton is calibrating the scope or range of an instrument. While it seems to be some sort of scientific instrument, it turns out to make music too.
August 8, 2011
I'm beginning to think that Danielle Dutton might be the Marianne Moore of the fiction world, the way she stitches & remixes & works in material from an astonishing array of source texts. But the resulting text is all Dutton's own, and is delicious food for anyone who craves precise intelligent language with loads of personality and a Jamesian gift for transforming the world of the page through the elusive thoughts & wishes of preternaturally sensitive characters. Many of Dutton's narrators are heroines, borrowed & updated from the shelves of classic literature, and these women exhibit healthy doses of subversion & whimsy throughout their fascinating, at times enigmatic, tales. They embody both feminist proprioception & subtextual empowerment, and when one character declares "I am an army I march towards the shore," you know that a revolution is seeping in covertly from the margins.
October 9, 2008
It's important to recognize a prose writer who is not afraid to utilize her language, wit and humor to comment on past themes and make something new out of them. The acuity of Dutton's imagery and style bound out of the page.
July 29, 2013
A nice exercise for your literary reference muscle, Dutton's experiments and remixes of classics are fun and deceptively dense for such a short book.
February 27, 2010
Her writing style is exciting; her choice of words beautiful.
Read
February 5, 2018I came across this book in the assorted bargain bin at Aardvark Books around the corner from where my sister lives on Church Street on San Francisco. I picked it up because Danielle Dutton is a wonderful publisher of books, having founded Dorothy, a publishing project, a indie press that publishes work by women. Dorothy, a publishing project is responsible for two singular reading experiences I had last year - The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George and a splendid collection of stories by the surrealist Leonora Carrington.
I am so obsessed with Dorothy, a publishing project that I created a Wikipedia page about it. Thankfully it passed muster with the editors over there as sufficiently notable (historically and culturally significant to use Library of Congress terminology).
I am also delighted to report that City Lights Books in San Francisco has an entire shelf dedicated to titles published by Dorothy. However, I will note that Attempts at Life was published by an entirely different indie publisher (Tarpaulin Sky Press), years before Dutton founded Dorothy.
Onto the text itself -== Attempts at a Life follows the way of the magpie, which appeals greatly to my magpie-ish prejudices. The 'attempts' of the title are tidbits, or more generously vignettes that add up to a somewhat delirious work of bricolage.
Existing in a ma-space somewhere between fiction, memoir, and prose poetry, the book feels most natural when it leans into its memoir mode. The book's sense of peculiarity felt forced at times, as if Dutton was trying to stuff her bird rather than let it collect what it will.
More later.
I am so obsessed with Dorothy, a publishing project that I created a Wikipedia page about it. Thankfully it passed muster with the editors over there as sufficiently notable (historically and culturally significant to use Library of Congress terminology).
I am also delighted to report that City Lights Books in San Francisco has an entire shelf dedicated to titles published by Dorothy. However, I will note that Attempts at Life was published by an entirely different indie publisher (Tarpaulin Sky Press), years before Dutton founded Dorothy.
Onto the text itself -== Attempts at a Life follows the way of the magpie, which appeals greatly to my magpie-ish prejudices. The 'attempts' of the title are tidbits, or more generously vignettes that add up to a somewhat delirious work of bricolage.
Existing in a ma-space somewhere between fiction, memoir, and prose poetry, the book feels most natural when it leans into its memoir mode. The book's sense of peculiarity felt forced at times, as if Dutton was trying to stuff her bird rather than let it collect what it will.
More later.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews