Short Stories | Garielle Lutz: Journey into the Loneliness of Language

The lives of middle-aged, middle-class people in the medium-sized cities of the United States are joyless, lacking social cohesion and a sense of community. Suffering is easier than solving it, as popular psychology knows, and functional melancholics know this. And so they drag themselves through everyday life, fulfilling the duties of family and job, without change ever being a serious option. They simply remain very, very lonely.

The writer, sentence artist, and master of description of this misery is Garielle Lutz. She was born Gary Lutz in 1955 into the working-class Pennsylvania. They spoke little at home, there were practically no books, and anything like proletarian self-confidence plays no role in her literature; as if the mere possibility of intervening in the workings of society were a bizarre fantasy from Old Europe.

Lutz attends university, studying English and creative writing. Gary works as a lecturer, but doesn't pursue a career. He teaches remedial classes and writes books on English grammar. Language helps lift one out of the gloom, because speaking brings light; it helps one formulate one's way out of misery by using syntactical tricks, breaking the silence, and keeping thoughts and perspectives flexible so as not to remain pessimistic.

In the 1990s, Lutz's talent finally received prominent support: The legendary editor Gordon Lish, who, among other things, was responsible for Raymond Carver's global fame (and heavily intervened in his texts), took a liking to his offbeat short stories about eternal marital crises, family rituals, sad sex, gender pain, and the non-encounters of outsiders. Gary (then still) was published in magazines, received small awards, and was able to publish books with his stories. Despite the lack of understanding from the arts pages, a fan base developed, including successful novelists such as Ben Marcus, the Oxford literary scholar Merve Emre, and, in German-speaking countries, Clemens J. Setz.

Weissbooks has now published a second Lutz story collection, translated into German by Christophe Fricker. The title "I Seemed Alive" doesn't promise vitalistic bravado, but rather depressive exercises. But this description doesn't do justice to the stories, which usually only cover a few pages (never more than ten). The narrator is usually the first person, and there are no lighthearted passages. But, as silly as it may sound, Lutz isn't concerned with individual psychology, but rather with language, what it can express, how it relates to reality: "I can hardly remember my childhood, but I do remember that I never felt completely loved or abandoned. It wasn't until my mid-twenties that I was considered someone who, in anger, had to be thought of by my parents, who in turn had been thought of by their own merciless mothers and fathers. In this pious world, we must be destined to be monsters and to endure."

Generational loops of violence and resignation , packaged in sentences that take detours, in which words weigh each other against each other, reveal themselves as blabber, as a makeshift. Lutz announced in 2020 that he was trans and from then on called himself Garielle. These stories, which originally appeared in English more than 20 years ago, are already about gender indeterminacy, about men married to women with children who seek and find maximally anonymous sex with other men (in a world before Grindr) and part as sadly as before. The gift of formulation, as self-consciousness, creates a profound distance and brutal precision at the same time: "By the time I reached the bed, the man had already pulled most of the daylight out of the blinds. There was the worsening sound of people embarrassed to part with their underwear (...)."

Translator Christophe Fricker finds good solutions for Lutz's idiosyncratic syntax, but the many syllables in German, the units of sentence structure, perhaps inevitably make everything sound a bit more stilted and complicated than in the original. People who don't value suspense, opinionated twanging, or desirable surrogate lives in literature should definitely read Lutz's stories, for she is a unique field researcher of loneliness (in) language.

Garielle Lutz: I Seemed Alive. Translated from American English by Christophe Fricker. With a report by David Nutt. Weissbooks, 256 pp., hardcover, €22.