Mordant debut collection of terse stories (some only a few paragraphs long), featuring a playful use of language in the service of a grim vision of contemporary life. Lutz's protagonists are, typically, obsessive catalogers of life's minutiae, going through the motions at vaguely delineated jobs, baffled by life, between relationships and wondering, as one puts it, ``at what point people become environments for one another to enter.'' All of them would agree with the harassed character who stops the narrator of ``When You Got Back'' on a parking lot to complain cryptically that ``there was something unutterably troubling and unfinished about what had happened.'' In these tales, of course, the important things have happened long ago, and they happened somewhere offstage. What Lutz offers is the aftermath. In ``Slops,'' a college professor in his ``shadowed, septic thirties,'' suffering from colitis, offers brief descriptions of the ways in which he keeps colleagues and students (``the whole faceless, rostered population of them'') at a distance. Indirectly, something larger, a sense of the haunted, hapless nature of the man, comes through. In ``Recessional,'' the narrator (``a shadow- slopping, chronically how-evering man'') finds himself increasingly unable to utter even the simplest commands, to communicate at all, or to take action, and is reduced to precisely describing even the smallest gestures of those around him, as if to recapture his rapidly evaporating self. The problem is that the language these figures use, the exact, even prissy, descriptive monologues common to the pieces, is at first startling but quickly, across the span of many tales, becomes rather deadening. And the disaffected figures here, who seem at first both deeply alarming and memorable, begin to seem too much alike. There's no doubt that Lutz offers a distinctive, disturbing vision of an anomic world. But a little of this vision goes a very long way.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42596-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
Welcome, a warm welcome, for this Collection of Short Works, viz. pleasures. Whether it's "Who Am I This Time," the little clerk in the hardware store who only comes alive on his local small town stage; or the schizzy inheritor of "The Foster Portfolio" (pushing close to a million dollars) who lives frugally (his mother) and has to work weekends (playing an obsessed piano in a joint—his father); or the well remembered (Sunday Times) review of the Random House "Dictionary"; or his storm window, bathroom enclosure salesman who appears in two pieces. Quite a few of these stories, including that of the title, are science fiction and full of someday surprises—the Ethical Birth Control pill which destroys the impulse at the source; or the euphoric gadget which supplies killowatts of happiness. There's the shattering "All the King's Horses," a ghastly game of human chess, and the nicest kind of sentiment in "The Kid Nobody Could Handle" and "Adam," All in all, a versatile, volatile talent—inventive, catchy, charming.
Pub Date: Aug. 19, 1968
ISBN: 0385333501
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1968
A treasured staff writer for The New Yorker from 1949 to the mid-70s, Brennan, who died in 1993, receives fresh, well-earned attention in a collection of her 21 Irish stories, all previously published either in Christmas Eve (1974) or In and Out of Never- Never Land (1969,) together with a frank introduction from her editor William Maxwell. The stories appear in three groups, the first autobiographical, and the second and third concerning two separate families, each of whose quietly desperate circumstances is detailed in a series of overlapping vignettes. For Rose and Hubert Derdon, the state of things surfaces in ``A Young Girl Can Spoil Her Chances'' when Rose, as always, goes to a Mass commemorating her father's death, now 43 years ago, leaving Hubert, as always resentful at the upset of his morning routine. Later, he wants to make amends, and remembers a blue hyacinth he'd given her years before and how happy she'd been to receive it. The truce established between them when he asks her about it, however, collapses as his habitual criticism of her resumes. In the third group, the Bagots—Delia, Martin, and their two young daughters- -fare only marginally better: Martin sleeps in a separate room and has only minimal communication with his family; Delia keeps an immaculate home but hardly ever leaves it. The loss of their firstborn son three days after his birth was a shock they never recovered from. In the extraordinary title piece, Delia and Martin's wedding is remembered after their deaths by his twin sister, spinster Min, who took their furniture and his wedding ring to her flat the better to indulge her satisfaction at having survived Martin, whom she feels betrayed his family to marry. With an understatement often approaching brilliance, the suppressed emotions and diminished lives echoing here make clear that this voice of the last generation deserves to be heard anew.
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-87046-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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