Q&A with Gary Lutz

About a year ago, I interviewed Gary Lutz for The Stranger. Here's what got left out.


Q. Many of your characters seem to be in a sort of bafflement about "sexual relationships." Though some of your narrators become serially involved with (or successively detached from) men and women, the word "bisexual" has a connotation of equipoise that just doesn't apply here. And the more or less heterosexual narrators also move through a succession of ties that tend toward obsolescence. Even at the level of the sentence, there is a tendency for your series to leap from the singular into a sort of "whatever." As in this from “The Pavilion”: "cinquefoils, observatories, anything."

A. Yes, I doubt that any of my characters would even for an instant consider themselves bisexual, and for many of them, the words "heterosexual" or "homosexual" would probably be little more than confoundingly inapplicable nomenclature. Some of my narrators find the differences between the genders negligible and not worth even acknowledging or honoring or troubling over. For them, I guess, every encountered person, every arrival, is a novel, consuming totality of life and limb--a stupefying array of skin, hair, teeth, arms, busying emotions: a useful human integer, in short, for the narrator to blunder against, mount, disappear into, rhapsodize about, ride out some sadness on, suspect of almost anything. And you're right to observe that after a point, the fussed precision with which the narrator carries on about the regarded person and their conjoint fumbles reaches a crisis of depletion, and the regarded person vagues out, and the relationship gets pretty vaporous pretty quick. At that moment, another person is no doubt motioning into the narrator's cleared gaze.

And also this, regarding writers:

A. Elizabeth Smart is a favorite of mine, solely on the basis of a tiny, thrilling, thunderous collection of stories called THE ASSUMPTION OF THE ROGUES & RASCALS. Among living writers of prose I admire Gordon Lish, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte, Dawn Raffel, Amy Hempel, Pamela Ryder, and Brian Evenson, each of whom is a supreme virtuoso of the sentence.