the sentences of Gordon Lish, Gary Lutz, and Christine Schutt

My friend and colleague Amitava Kumar pointed me to Gary Lutz's talk in the current issue of The Believer, which offers both an autobiographical account of how Lutz "came to language only late and only peculiarly," as well as a discussion of how Lutz reconsidered his idea of the sentence based on the remaindered Knopf books Lish edited (this same category of literature was also an influence on my work). From that point, Lutz offers an inspired craft lesson on sentences (and anyone who's read Lutz knows that his sentences are masterful):

The sentence is the site of your enterprise with words, the locale where language either comes to a head or does not. The sentence is a situation of words in the most literal sense: words must be situated in relation to others to produce an enduring effect on a reader. As you situate the words, you are of course intent on obeying the ordinances of syntax and grammar, unless any willful violation is your purpose—and you are intent as well on achieving in the arrangements of words as much fidelity as is possible to whatever you believe you have wanted to say or describe. A lot of writers—many of them—unfortunately seem to stop there. They seem content if the resultant sentence is free from obvious faults and is faithful to the lineaments of the thought or feeling or whatnot that was awaiting deathless expression. But some other writers seem to know that it takes more than that for a sentence to cohere and flourish as a work of art. They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words.

In N1BR, the new online book review of n+1 magazine, Carla Blumenkranz reviews Christine Schutt's new novel, again focusing on language and Lish's inheritance, but concluding that "[Schutt's] language...has changed. There is the same obsessive labor over the sounds and rhythms of sentences, but with Schutt's narrator further removed, they no longer have such a strenuous feel to them."