Brian Dillon
Amid the twisted humor of Lynne Tillman’s short stories, an incomparable chronicling of human relations.
Thrilled to Death, by Lynne Tillman,
Soft Skull, 304 pages, $27
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Thrilled to Death collects forty-one of Lynne Tillman’s short stories, drawn from four decades of her mercurial career and offered here without concession to chronology or any indication as to when or where the pieces first appeared. In her thoughtful introduction, the critic Christine Smallwood notes that Tillman preferred a thematic array for the book and wished to avoid any implication of her “progress” as a writer—which is quite in keeping with the work itself and its vertiginous amusement with narrative direction, coherent voice, and abiding subjects. As Smallwood puts it, “Her prose is like a disco wrecking ball, noisily smashing conventions of character and pilot, and merrily strewing beams of crazed (cracked) insight all over the house of fiction.” Tillman is also an extraordinarily acute essayist and memoirist—her most recent book is MOTHERCARE (2022), on the rigors of caring for her own mother—as well as a novelist of wild formal and argumentative ambition. But her stories seem to best foreground certain aspects of her writing: a determined oddity of address to the reader, a playful but pitiless application of ideas, and a comedy that might be most astringent over the space and time of this shorter form.
Of course, we are not dealing with stories quite without plot or persona: here is a dramatis of the lonely and lovelorn, Marilyn Monroe “speaking from the dead,” New Yorkers troubled by cats or pigeons and what these creatures’ plights may mean for the characters’ solitudes or relationships. Even when character is a conundrum—who is the nameless narrator of “More Sex,” whose wonder at the idea that men think about sex every seven minutes gives way to musings on which Hollywood stars she did not wish to have sex with? (George Clooney, Sean Penn, Tom Hanks, Ralph Fiennes, a “weaselly” Michael Imperioli.) More abstracted still: the nine scenes of isolation or missed intimacy in “Hold Me,” where character and plot are mere half-page fleeting encounters but dramatize an intense vulnerability that is coolly heartbreaking: “She went to bed and, like a child, pulled the covers over her head. She smashed wordless ghosts of things in her dreams.” At times, you wonder how much you are supposed to “believe” (is that what we do with invented people?) in these characters, or if they are satiric vehicles for Tillman’s assault on assumptions about who and what we can identify on the page. It may or may not make a difference that the medical emotional adventures of individuals called Charles and Emma (in “Come and Go,” the collection’s first story) put us in mind of Madame Bovary.
What does Tillman’s comedy consist of in terms of texture and tone? As also in her novel American Genius, A Comedy (2006), it is a matter of a narrator’s endlessly unspooling, obsessive, tellingly and entertainingly tedious attention to things, or to rituals and patterns in everyday life—their psychopathology, in fact. (Psychoanalysis is a constant in these pieces, invoked lightly and almost parodically in places, in others a fundamental armature for understanding desires and motivations.) In “This Is Not It,” the speaker unrolls a litany of small wrongnesses in life that build to a sense of fitting ill in the world, like a bitter and hapless little man out of Dostoevsky or Gogol. “Whatever comedy I am in, whenever I inadvertently participate, it is being played by overly tragic people. It is the wrong comedy. I am unsuitably sad.” But comedy in Tillman’s stories also consists of the constellating of an absurd collection of secondhand ways of approaching the world. In “Other Movies,” everything and everyone is secondary or subordinate to culture, reminding the narrator of their Hollywood or TV originals: “He’s a Bruce Dern type, a bitter man with a dark past. Or, as he’s already in a wheelchair, he could be Raymond Burr in Ironside.” America, land of analogy.
The earliest of the works in Thrilled to Death is from 1982: around the time that the elaborate, whimsical, masculine, Dada-via-Mad-magazine postmodernists of the 1970s ceded their cutting-edge currency to the new decade’s increasingly conservative realism—whether gritty or glitzy. You could argue that, among much else, Tillman preserved and pursued a twisted take on smart and funny American metafiction at a time when such impishness was out of fashion. “Aka Mergatroyde” is like prime Donald Barthelme of the 1960s, and ought to be illustrated by Edward Gorey. It’s a story in which the author or narrator admits that “Lynne Tillman” is a pseudonym, and she’s really a member of the storied and eccentric Mergatroyde clan, whose exploits and excesses follow. There is the murderous Scottish master-builder ancestor Mergatroyde; the fratricide inventor Wallace Mergatroyde, wielder of “a hammer he might have invented;” the social worker Harris Mergatroyde: “the person who thought up putting the pictures of missing kids on milk cartons.” So far so slapstick-gothic: I picture a genteelly cruel comedy film in which all these Mergatroydes are played by Alec Guinness or Tilda Swinton. But Tillman’s intergenerational intrigues and lethal atavistic oddbods are mere baroque stand-ins for a more mundane and fundamental psychodrama: “Let’s face it. The American family is no picnic. Why should the Mergatroydes be an exception?”
In the end, this is Tillman’s recurring theme, the hot core around which all of her fizzing games with the rules of fiction and her complex assemblage of intellectual, literary, and pop-cultural splendors may spin. She is an incomparable writer about the entanglements of kinship and romance, these unnatural states traversed by culture and the intrusion of mundanity. In “Living with Contradictions,” she writes: “Intimacy is something people used to talk about before commercials. Now there’s nothing to say.” Except, this kind of insight is as self-preserving as it is acute: “Calling love desire doesn’t change the need.” Among the joys of Tillman’s work: the fact we can never decide or choose between her teeming ideas or knowing citations, her formal adventures, and an emotional depth that is unafraid to approach something like wisdom.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are published by New York Review Books. He is working on Ambivalence: An Education.