When Garielle Lutz’s name first began circulating on prediction lists for the Nobel Prize in Literature two years ago, almost no one was surprised, for the simple reason that almost no one knew who Garielle Lutz was. But for those capable of surprise in this context—Lutz’s small cult of superfans, who view her as a hero of contemporary experimental fiction—her inclusion was close to shocking. We knew her stock had risen: The release of her collected stories in 2019 had earned her the kind of lengthy critical appraisals she’d deserved for at least a quarter century. But was she really now in the same league, reputationally, as a Pynchon, a Murakami, a Can Xue? It seemed like a fluke, and yet there she was again this year, granted 33:1 odds by Ladbrokes—dead-even with Colson Whitehead and slightly higher than Louise Erdrich. The conditions would seem ripe, in other words, for a true Lutz breakthrough, a rapprochement between her and the literary mainstream, which has typically demanded the kinds of things (plots, characters, straightforwardly legible sentences) that Lutz has been unable or unwilling to provide. Thankfully, Lutz has refused to capitalize. Her latest book, Backwardness: From Letters and Notebooks 1973–2023, is many things, nearly all of them admirable. One thing it is not, however, is reader-friendly.

The barrier to entry with Lutz’s past work has doubled as its chief selling point: the oddity, extravagance, and annihilating causticity of her prose. Though born and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Lutz wields the English language like a polymath émigré—Nabokov if Nabokov had spent 40 years slowly going insane in a suburban Pittsburgh apartment, surrounded by Burger King receipts and antique dictionaries. It takes a decidedly skewed, nonintuitive approach to the English language to compose a sentence like this one:

The voice that finally broke away from the man was hard on words but got it put far enough out into speech that he was strapped for companionship, and the reason was always for a number of reasons, naturally, but the one he was offering us was that he was one half, the more spacious half, of a marriage to a woman who wasn’t just anybody but who was hardly a shoplifter, either, though she had an overactive feel for merchandise—juvenile cosmetics, mostly—and knew how easily the motions of their molecules could be made to shut down until the lipsticks, the compacts and applicators, suffered a persuasive, deserving absenteeism from the pegboard wall of the store, then declared themselves with renewed materiality in the pockets of her coat.

—which I quite literally just plucked at random from my spine-snapped copy of Lutz’s collected stories and which can easily stand in for the entire corpus, in the sense that Lutz’s work is less a series of discrete narratives than a repository of perfectly tuned phrases endlessly circling her key themes of loneliness, erotic failure, self-destruction, and regret.

The trouble with Backwardness, for the non-Lutz fanatic, is of a different order. For one thing, this book—a kind of collaged autobiography made up of letters and journals composed over the course of 50 years—is very long: at 931 pages, roughly twice the length of all of her previous work combined. At least 200 of those pages consist of minutely detailed descriptions of meals eaten alone at fast-food restaurants in small towns throughout Pennsylvania and Ohio. Nearly as many take the form of recounted dreams, aimless strolls through department stores, and letters to enemies real and imagined, among them the circulation department of Lutz’s grad-school library (which ridiculed her for requesting an issue of Interview), the editors of Out (who mangled the copy of a personal ad she submitted), and the corporate headquarters of Arby’s (a long story involving a mishandled coupon). 

Like her fiction, then, Backwardness is a tough sell. Any brief synopsis of this book will make it sound indulgent, repetitive, and unabashedly nuts, and any honest assessment of it would have to concede that it is, in actual fact, all three of those things. But it is also, I’m convinced, a masterpiece, one that captures things rarely expressed about what it feels like to be stuck in the same head every second of every day until death—to be always, forever, and unrelievedly yourself. That it has, nearly a year after its release, failed to light up the culture—failed even, until this very review, to warrant a single critical notice of any kind—is to be expected: Many landmark encyclopedic works have taken the scenic route to prominence, after a few trial decades of scorn or neglect. Granted, where a thousand-pager like William Gaddis’s The Recognitions is encyclopedic on such subjects as forgery and Renaissance art and the quest for authenticity in a fallen world, Backwardness is encyclopedic primarily on the subject of Garielle Lutz, with a particular emphasis on her midday hamburger preferences. But as a subject, it turns out that Garielle Lutz—previously a cipher even to her most ardent admirers—is inexhaustible: as singular, and transfixing, as any of her fictional narrators.

Lutz published her first story collection, Stories in the Worst Way (1996), in her 40s, after attending a series of summer workshops with the legendary editor Gordon Lish. It was from Lish that she learned the concept of “consecution,” defined by Lutz in a cult-famous essay on the subject as “a recursive procedure by which one word pursues itself into its successor by discharging something from deep within itself into what follows.” As a description of the Lishian mode, this tells only part of the story: Many writers, after all, are attuned to the acoustics of language. It is the Lishian sensibility that completes the picture, a sensibility that Lish once helpfully itemized as follows:

1 Loosened association.
2 Antic behavior.
3 Autism.
4 Morbid ambivalence.

You know it, perhaps, when you see it: a compacted prose less narrated than declaimed, concerned typically with one confused individual’s vast, compounding, and more often than not substance-fueled mistakes. To varying degrees, the Lishian elements are present in all the marquee names of this school: Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Sam Lipsyte, Joy Williams. And yet next to Lutz, these writers are mere cultural Lishians—informed by the tradition but not consumed by it. Lutz is a fanatic—nearly a heretic in the extremity of her approach. “Loosened” barely begins to capture the laxity of association on display in the average Lutz story, which may proceed through 50 different micro-scenarios in half as many pages. Hers are stories that literally can’t be summarized—the map is the size of the territory—related in an English so sonically precise and culture-bound that, it has been said, it cannot be usefully translated. They are bizarre, linguistically novel, and—important to note—often extremely funny. But as the novelist Adam Wilson pointed out in a review of Lutz’s collected work, they operate in a narrow range. You turn to Lutz for the same reason you turn to certain strains of black metal: to revel in a single style exploded to its absolute, sense-fraying limits.

In interviews, Lutz has long maintained that she writes the way she does out of necessity; she is helpless to write otherwise. Backwardness demolishes this notion from its very first page. Going in expecting the usual Lutzian preoccupations—joyless sex, desolating office work, lavishly described coils of pubic hair—one finds instead an authentically moving queer love story. It’s 1973, in Allentown. Lutz, still a half century or so from coming out as trans, is to all the world—and possibly to herself—an 18-year-old gay male, newly in love with a classmate she calls S. As arty teens trapped in a nowhere town, they give each other identical short haircuts and remodel their shared room to look like Warhol’s Factory. This is still a Garielle Lutz story, so fluids are inevitably swapped in the vicinity of a public toilet, but here the action is chaste and sweet instead of ambiently menacing: a brief kiss in a Burger King bathroom “before somebody barged in to take a simple, easy-hearted, shank-of-the-evening workingman’s shit.” After a few months, S. and Lutz break up; S. attempts suicide; Lutz opts for conversion therapy. This opening story—which comprises only a fraction of Backwardness’s 900-plus pages—eventually zooms out to encompass a quarter century of sporadic reconnections, as S.’s life blooms and Lutz’s withers into the wearying gauntlet of stagnation and loneliness that will define most of the rest of Backwardness.

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What is remarkable about this 27-page narrative is that it smuggles Lutz’s distinctive phraseology—S. is described as “a bright-bloomed person of molten affections given unstintingly”—into a story of almost conventional shapeliness and comprehensibility. There is the poignancy, too, of hearing this story in Backwardness from two very different Lutzes: the rueful, regret-choked, fortysomething author and the hopeful teenager on display in some of the letters that follow, who can straightforwardly write a sentence like “I have a wonderful new friend, and we do all sorts of wonderful things together” without grimacing in pain.

Lutz’s few months with S. haunt the first half of Backwardness, with Lutz continuing to mark the anniversary of their meeting decades after the fact. The bulk of Backwardness would suggest that this romance was less a trauma from which Lutz never recovered than an aberrant interlude of relative contentment in a life sapped of healthy human feeling from earliest childhood. Readers of Lutz’s exactingly bleak short stories might have guessed that their author was not a happy person, but Backwardness removes all doubt. This lifelong condition might have something to do with the disease Lutz writes about contracting in elementary school, which softened the bones in her hips and for a time necessitated the use of a horrific spinal brace. Or it might have something to do with her mother, a kind of Rust Belt Livia Soprano, always ready with another homophobic insult. (When Lutz calls her mother from a police station, having been threatened with a knife by a stranger, her mother says, “What, you propositioned him?”) The experience of growing up without a stable or affirmed gender identity in 1960s and ’70s Pennsylvania can’t have helped matters either. But as with Franz Kafka—who had his own sensible reasons to feel out of place in early-20th-century Prague—Lutz’s sense of otherness seems fated, an inborn condition only glancingly connected to the prevailing local bigotries.

Parallels between Kafka and Lutz abound, not least a facility for what Lutz at one point calls “exuberant hopelessness” (Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard also come to mind here: all of them writers who are at their happiest when denouncing existence). But on the level of personal eccentricity, Lutz is in a league all her own. It is one thing to not drink alcohol or coffee; it is another thing to not drink water, which Lutz finds “putrid” (she drinks Diet Coke instead). We learn as well in Backwardness that Lutz has had Burger King for lunch nearly every single day for 20 years; that she owns just a single utensil, a spoon, replaced about once a decade; that she lives in an apartment so crammed with junk that she sensibly fears eviction; that she owns a bed but opts to sleep on the floor, usually in the living room but sometimes in the bathroom, depending on how much noise her neighbors are making; that she in general so acutely feels “the lives of others stacked horizontally and vertically across my own” that she struggles to calmly shit in her own apartment. The blinds of this apartment are always drawn. She claims not to have received a visitor there in nearly three years.

You may not, like Lutz, sleep beside a Rubbermaid pitcher filled with your own piss, but you are human, and thus engaged regularly in shameful rituals of sloth or self-upkeep. Staying alive, as Lutz well knows, isn’t pretty. “The thing about living alone is how much of a life goes unwitnessed,” she writes, and in a sense Backwardness is an attempt to recover—to re-create—those eons of blank, squandered time: the anxious shitting, the mindless eating, the brain-sick hours on the floor. What Herman Melville did for the whaling ship, what Thomas Mann did for the sanitorium, Lutz has done for sitting alone in your shitty apartment and praying half-heartedly for death: charting this world’s customs, its superstitions and stray moods, and bringing us actual news, as in the book’s stunning final section, an account of struggling through the bureaucracy of Medicare and public assistance in the early stages of both the Covid-19 pandemic and Lutz’s late-life public transition. If there really is a loneliness epidemic in America, Backwardness may one day emerge as its signal text.

Backwardness’s most affecting stretch arrives as a flashback in that final section, and concerns the decline and death of Lutz’s mother. Despite the insults, the two were close: Lutz regularly drove across the state to see her. When she begins to exhibit signs of dementia, Lutz moves her to an assisted-living facility near her apartment and visits her almost nightly. The terminal milieu of the facility is vividly sketched, with its “crockety, battlesome residents,” its grim nightly revues of ’40s standards, its doctors who “seemed more like technicians than healers.” When her mother dies, after nine catatonic days, Lutz insists to the aides that she’s still breathing. Lutz maintains this conviction at the funeral home the next day, and the day after that, at the “little building that looked like it had once been a gas station”—the crematorium, to which Lutz has insisted on accompanying the funeral home director in contravention of company policy. When Lutz drives away, she feels “more alone than I had ever felt in my life,” an admission only marginally less shattering than the one delivered parenthetically a few pages earlier, after Lutz is hugged by the nursing home’s director of dining services while packing up her mother’s things: “That was almost six years ago—I haven’t had a hug since.”

Between the queer love story that opens the book and the account of her mother’s death are a half-dozen or so self-contained sections of equal roundedness and force. Excised and slapped together, they’d form the most accessible work of Lutz’s career, an episodic memoir-in-stories in the vein of Donald Antrim’s The Afterlife. For the sake of Lutz’s own health and financial stability, it’s hard not to wish she’d taken this route: In the final pages of Backwardness, Lutz says she is living on a food budget of barely $5 a day—classed by the State of Pennsylvania as “very low income”—and choosing voluntarily to make do with even less, on the logic that “a woman my age earns, on average, only seventy-five percent of what a man earns, so I need to adjust my standard of living accordingly.” And yet with Backwardness, Lutz has charted a tougher course, opting to entomb these relative crowd-pleasers within a monstrously elaborated edifice constructed of bad meals, faces briefly glimpsed in bus stations, overheard dialogue, discordant childhood memories, encounters with men and women in hotel rooms and trash-strewn apartments, complaints about noisy neighbors, and—over and over again, in a hundred different ways—laments about a life that Lutz will “never know how to live.” And that’s not even to mention the book’s penultimate section, which amounts to a brand-new, 150-page Garielle Lutz short story collection, the oneiric edges of which bleed backward and forward into the book’s ostensibly nonfictional content.

Lutz did not construct her book this way to annoy or repel people. If Backwardness is an odd book, it is because Garielle Lutz happens to be—by her own admission, and on the abundant evidence of Backwardness—an extraordinarily odd person, pledged unpretentiously to the fulfillment of a knotty private vision. Where generational peers like David Foster Wallace and Rick Moody published big books at least in part to showcase their learning and virility, Lutz has published a big book which insists on nearly every page that she is socially pathetic, sexually inept, unlettered, and doomed for reasons of weak character to permanent solitude and failure. The reader knows this isn’t true—knows that Lutz is, on the contrary, a literary genius—but Backwardness would fail if Lutz didn’t wholeheartedly believe these things, or persuasively seem to. That is the massive and surprising pathos at the core of this bizarre, determinedly avant-garde, outwardly rebarbative book: Nearly 70 years old, Lutz remains as unsure of herself as she was in her freshman year of college, when she was dating S. and life seemed marginally more bearable. In Backwardness, she works for our love with her language while assuming she will never receive it, and that she wouldn’t deserve it even if she did. By the final page, you want to get on a bus to Greensburg and hug her yourself.