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The stories in Some Day This Will Be Funny marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators by turn infamous and nameless shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind. Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining experimental short fiction.
mesmerism Lynne Tillman is a writer really like no other but if comparisons were forced perhaps Jane Bowles, Thomas Bernhard come to mind. She is at the height of her powers in this collection. She faces death, life, ghosts, memory, time and the absurd business of the human condition with a deft and mysterious touch.It’s the kind of collection you can pick up, read a few of its short, dazzling pieces and feel smarter, graced, less of a failure (for knowing you are one), an enrichment that comes from small phrases of time, an hour here or there. Read the last story, for instance, and feel you love this person and also know how hard it is to be her. To be you.
Uneven Having read some reviews in BookForum which referenced literary icons, and how girls think and spend time in their rooms, I checked out this book at the library; after skimming a few pages of Love Sentence, pp 111-136 which is brilliant. I haven’t read Green Girl yet, but Love Sentence must certainly outdo it in references. The obsessive nature of the letters to past or even future lovers is probably universal at least in thought sequences while lying in bed.Definitely would like to read other works, esp. This Is Not It.The Someday collection, other than Love Sentence, is rather prosaic or journalistic documentary style in my opinion. But I have only read about half the collection.
the reviews sounded so good…. and I just couldn’t get into it:( I hope others do – wish I could have “returned it” from the Kindle. Just not the book for me.