cover image Stories in the Worst Way

Stories in the Worst Way

Gary Lutz. Alfred A. Knopf, $21 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-679-42596-0

Postmodern in tone and structure, the 36 short stories collected in this debut by Lutz are unremittingly grim, pretentious and oblique. More character studies than narratives, the pieces involve unsavory, self-hating characters: an antisocial college professor with an unfortunate bowel condition (""Slops""); an obsessive, gay office drone who spends his days secretly harassing his female co-workers (""Certain Riddances''); another gay man whose random promiscuity masks a deeper loneliness (""SMTWTFS''). The narratives themselves are static, if vivid, portraits. In ""Waking Hours,"" a gay, divorced man with a dull new job instructing middle-management types on ""how to bestow awards on undeserving employees'' describes himself as ""self-devastated,"" and goes on to prove it: he has a strained meal with the ""mothered-down version"" of his young son; he believes that check-out clerks at the supermarket might truly understand him through eye-contact; he pays attention to--and mimics--every noise his fellow tenants make in his apartment building. In a grotesque, misogynist fable, ""The Pavilion,"" a man devises ""a new angle on how to start a family,"" which essentially turns out to be hiring a woman, getting her pregnant and then, before an audience, pulling out her teeth and tongue while she gives birth. In spite of Lutz's flair with an airlessly ironic wit and occasional clever wordplay (an office worker's ""extracubicular life""), these stories, all too unoriginally, live up to the collection's title. (Nov.)