Lynne Tillman: Someday This Will Be Funny
25.05.11
Someday This Will Be Funny
Lynne Tillman
Red Lemonade
April 22, 2011
160 pgs
One way to read Lynne Tillman is to sit astride another person and read Lynne Tillman aloud. You won’t look at them because you’ll be reading the words trying to catch each one and every so often look up and the other person will or will not be looking at you reading, or they will be wondering why you’re reading, or looking over your shoulder at their computer trying to find a movie they want to watch and thinking about whether or not they want to fuck you later. And the longer this goes on the more urgent it becomes that you stop or keep going, either moving closer or further away in intention, and the more you insist with the cadence of your reading that other person “get it,” in the same way you feel Lynne Tillman gets it, in the way she sees right through you because you’re a person, too, and whether or not she likes you, at least she gets it.
She doesn’t like you. You met her once in graduate school, or you were in graduate school, and she was reading from her then-new novel American Genius, which you didn’t finish because you were busy trying to drown yourself in wine and bathtubs on the weekends, and after she read and talked for awhile some people got up and asked her to sign their copies of American Genius, and so did you, even though you were on the edge of illiteracy and illegibility, and she looked you in the face and said, “you didn’t ask a question,” alluding to the question and answer part of the reading which was also a class, and you said, “no, I didn’t.” Then she signed your book, allowing you to just be in that moment clear and awful and probably a hypocrite, but she could see it and you weren’t hiding it, and you valued that part of meeting her for years afterward, after you finally finished reading the book, after you sold the book and all of your other books to the new & used bookshop in Berkeley so you could move back across the country. Lynne Tillman allows you to be honest because Lynne Tillman is honest.
Lynne calls things out by name, recognizes them in a way that allows them to be seen clearly and yet retain their mystery because the mystery is inherent to the object named and our understanding of it. Great Uncle Charley’s secret, integral to “But There’s A Family Resemblance” and never discovered until his death, is never made subject to the outsider’s gaze. The final veil is never dropped, less out of coyness on the part of the author than the awareness that mystery is part of the thing itself and a final reveal would diminish it. One way to read is to be a voyeur, and you may be disappointed.
One way to read Tillman is to take it all very personally. To see yourself in Paige, in Thomas, in the anecdote of a friend in Greece when you were that friend in Greece who told Lynne that story, as Ollie, to whom she writes the letter. “Whatever.” We are or are not these people, we are or are not felt to matter, the actuality is in no way congruent to the writing and the experience of being read. The person on the train being read, the woman on the psychoanalyst’s couch being read, the book being read – Someday This Will Be Funny.
One way to read Tillman is to become obsessed with the strata: laminations of quote, epistle, anecdote, reminiscence. To watch the clauses accumulate, the layers of meaning, as they change what she means and what we are meant to take away, to become lost in the labyrinth of equivocation and hearsay. We can pick them apart, we can grasp their meaning, but it’s in the to-ing and fro-ing of thought, the mind in its rocking chair moving but never settling, that the work finds its balance. Paige seeks through the pages of literature, the winking cursor on the screen, her own thoughts for what love might be, where she might find it, in a display of brinksmanship that never falls into nuclear disaster or a world-ending display of sappiness. One way is to admire the strands of dream, fantasy, hallucination, memory, and reality, woven so closely as to become indiscernible, to become insensible with the weight of the reality we create like Thomas does. One way is to exist between the certainties of life and its metaphors, to watch the mourning doves and be drawn in, to give credence to a world in which our ex-loves may be written off as dreams and converted into the boot that spurs the artist to create. To recycle our feelings into the image or word. To simply replicate what has come before, the faces of generations, the blue, the chartreuse, the mirrored hall of thought, and instead of settle on a single image to pace obsessively the line of desire, the path of our thoughts, our precursors, whittling down the specificity of the emotion to the original impulse.
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Read here from the publisher Someday This Will Be Funny, Red Lemonade, brainchild of former Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash.