Book of the Week: Unlucky Lucky Days by Daniel Grandbois

I was on vacation in San Francisco recently and one of the necessary items on my to-do list was a pilgrimage to City Lights Books. While perusing the shelves, I spied a signed copy of Daniel Granbois’ Unlucky Lucky Days. Knowing the man’s name and having heard great things about him from trustworthy people, I decided to plunk down some hard-earned cash.

Grandbois gave me my money’s worth. Even though it is a slim book at 117 pages, Unlucky Lucky Days is packed with 73 short tales. The longest maxes out at three pages, the shortest three sentences. Each one shows a writer so comfortable in his own skin, that he appears flawless at times. Granbois plays around with characters and prose in unique and inventive ways, creating his own genre of absurdist fiction populated with dead (or soon to be dying) humans, living everyday objects, and sentient wild creatures. There are mirrors that long for a different perspective, revenge-seeking middle fingers, and storytelling balls of yarn, all of whom live and breathe as much as any of the human characters in the book.

The best pieces – “The Note,” “The Yarn,” “The Tunnel,” and “Almost Borges” -- are more serious in tone, but show great heart and Granbois’ adeptness at creating deep, robust stories with very minimalist prose. That is not to detract from the lighter tales such as “Toothpaste, “The Finger,” “Three Wise Men,” and “Svevo,” which showcase the author’s dry sense of humor perfectly. And even the stories that don’t hit with as much impact (every reader will have their own favorites) still draw you into the strange world of the tale, sometimes in three paragraphs or less.

It was while perusing the book in City Lights, that I stumbled on to “The Note” and read the first paragraph:

“A note was pinned to a man in his coffin. It said, ‘I only seem dead.’ The man’s sister had pinned it there, as she’d pinned it to his pajamas before bed each night -- so afraid was he of being buried alive.

With her help, he’d escaped that dreadful fate.

She, however, did not.”

That is all of five sentences and yet it speaks volumes about the characters. I was hooked. Everything that followed, on the flight home, and the subway rides to work, did not disappoint either.

It’s not often you get to read stories by a writer who can take his work seriously, but seems to be having so much fun with the stories. Completely brilliant.

Book of the Week: Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz

There is a great bit of wisdom uttered by Lee, the doomed narrator of Boris Vian’s I Spit On Your Graves:

“It costs a lot to put out a book, and all the dressing is for a good purpose — it shows clearly too that most people don’t care about getting good books: what they really want is to have read the book recommended by their club, the book of the moment, and they don’t give a rap about the contents.”

It is a very spot-on sentiment and one that sadly pertains to Gary Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way. When it was originally released in 1996 Lutz’s collection of challenging and off-kilter short stories were dismissed, denounced, or simply ignored. In spite of being a protégée of renowned editor Gordon Lish — who inspired the author to scrape and claw at his prose, boiling it down to thin razor while also developing an approach to the English language that can only be perceived as one author rewriting our entire syntax — Lutz’s work was greeted as warmly as syphilis. When the collection was re-released in 2003 by 3rd Bed, it faired not much better. Perhaps greeted as warmly as gonorrhea.

The simple fact is that Stories in the Worst Way was not that book. It’s intent was obvious: not to reward or connect with the reader, but to challenge. As Lutz himself stated, “if I had been assigned to review it, I probably would've panned it myself. It's not the kind of book that's asking for any wide welcome.”

Lutz’s prose is not easy reading. Often, you have to go back, reread a sentence over and over again, chewing the prose until it finally digests itself into your brain. Of course using a vocabulary that seems to mine the dark recesses of Webster’s dictionary also does not help the book’s cause.

Take the following paragraph which is bound to throw fans of plain-spoken verbiage:

“Before the husband who kept leaving left for good, he accused me of two things: hirsutism and ‘self dependence.’ It is true that I had hair scribbled fine-pointedly over my arms and the backs of my hands and a few other places. It is also true that I liked to keep the marriage almost entirely to myself. There was more to get out of it that way.”

The effect created is that Lutz’s prose is precise – cutting and biting – and sludgy, drawing you into the muck of his character’s wayward lives. The cast is a collection of first-person misfits, malcontents, and outsiders. There is the office drone, who because of the efficiency of his work ethic, spends most of his time tormenting his co-workers in “Certain Riddances.” (“At first whenever the pressure to respond was acute – maybe every other day – I would simply slide an anonymous, index-carded ‘True’ or ‘False’ into her mail slot.”). Or the unfortunate high school teacher with a bad case of colitis in the aptly titled “Slops.” (“After each class, I lumped my way to whichever men’s room my notebook said was next. My life was an ambitious program of self-centrifugalization. I was casting myself out.”) Or the eternal ex-husband recounting his past wives and the negative impact of their cohabitation in “Devotions.” (“From time to time I show up in myself just long enough for people to know they are not in the room alone.”)

As you dig through Lutz’s stories, you cannot help but be in awe of the sheer force of his creativity, his ability to break literary conventions down and reconstruct it all in his own twisted form. He is the type of writer that makes you exclaim, “Crap, I wish I had written that line.” "Sleeveless" is as close as you can get to a perfectly crafted short story. It is all of 174 words and yet it hits you square in the gut with the tale of a husband being forced to give up his wife.

However this leads to a dilemma. Namely that often, Lutz’s bold experimentation doesn’t work. It falls flat, failing miserably. His love of language often causes him to overwrite characters, giving them voices that are either too introspective or frankly too damn educated for their insinuated background. After reading through the 36 stories in the collection (some as short as a single page), you are often left with the impression that you’ve been reading about the same character the entire time, simply cut and paste into a new identity. “That Which Is Husbander Than Anything Prior” comes off as rehash of Slops (minus the obvious fecal problems and swapping out the gender). Or even worse, stories such as “The Preventer of Sorrows” or “Their Sizes Run Differently” are so introspective and disjointed that they make no impact, leaving the reader feeling as if they’ve just reviewed a psychoanalyst’s report of a patient interview rather than a short story.

To be brutally honest, I don’t think Lutz cares. He’d rather push the prose in order to create something unique, as opposed to something likeable or readable. And in some ways there is much to be admired in that.

Stories in the Worst Way is nowhere near perfect, but like its grotesque narrators, there is beauty within the flaws.

If you use any of the book sharing sites, here a links to the novel for each:
Good Reads | Library Thing | Shelfari