When I’d put this volume of Lynne Tillman’s stories down, I’d be too anxious to pick it up again. I’d wash dishes instead, prematurely begin my tax return. It wasn’t because this career-spanning book, encompassing works from four collections by the American art critic and author, was bad. It was because the pleasure of reading it was perverse.
Like Christmas jokes told backwards, Thrilled to Death provides punchlines and premises, but not in the usual manner. The effect is as disorientating as laughing gas. Often these stories will lure you with romance, only to confound.
“I had fallen in love with Charles,” begins Coming of Age in Xania. At first it appears to be about a fling in Crete. Then the narrator ditches Charles, gets drunk and finds herself run out of town, accused of ruining another man’s life. “On a similar ride” to the airport one year later, the speaker reminisces, another acquaintance “would be killed in a car crash”. It’s messy. But isn’t growing up?
As with Shakespeare’s sonnets, these stories about-turn at the end. Unlike Shakespeare, Tillman is concerned with storytelling. In Hello and Goodbye, the narrator frets that a friend is frustrated by their French exits. During the last paragraph, it transpires their pal is in fact fed up with listening to this neurotic monologue. “My friend is exasperated,” it concludes, “looking at me standing up at my chair, trying not to put my coat on”. Here, narration isn’t the messenger but the message.
Crime fiction: 10 little Christmas murders, death in punkish New York, and the perfect ending
The Dinner Party by Viola van de Sandt: Distinct debut questions the nature of desire
Jeff Kinney: I do my best writing in my car in a cemetery in the middle of winter
James Joyce’s Legacies in Contemporary Irish Women’s Writing by Annalisa Mastronardi: a suit of scholarly armour
Much like Tillman’s irreverent novels Weird Fucks (2021) and Men and Apparitions (2018), Thrilled to Death turns the world, real and imagined, upside down. Among thinly veiled, William Burroughs-esque sci-fi satires on the nuclear family (aka Mergatroyde) and cyborg-dominated tomorrows (Future Prosthetic@?), there are strange fantasies, such as The Undiagnosed, recounting a night out with Clint Eastwood, and reflections on fiction itself. “What I love I can’t control,” remarks the eponymous protagonist of Madam Realism’s Torch Song.
Ultimately, Tillman’s stories hinge upon conjuring sense without the disappointment of arriving at a destination. “There are things I like to do, and I do them, and, as much as I can, I don’t do what I don’t want to do,” finishes That’s How Wrong My Love Is.
In the end, I didn’t complete my taxes either.
