“The first time I ever gave a reading, I was on so many tranquilizers that it was terrible,” admitted author Lynne Tillman during her Wednesday night reading at Russell House. “You get over it. But at first it’s very daunting.”
Tillman appeared at ease in the intimate setting of the Russell House while reading from her latest novel, “American Genius: A Comedy,” on Wednesday, Oct. 11. While the novel’s neurotic, rambling narrator gave Tillman’s writing an improvised tone, the author admitted that it had taken her five years of writing and heavy editing before at last completing the book for publication.
Tillman’s stream-of-consciousness style had her protagonist reflecting upon ostensibly unrelated memories, while subtly building a poetic critique of upper-class American society. The narrative jumped from musings on facials, to cats, to farting, to brain damage, then back to facials again. Tillman would later explain these tangents were far from spontaneous.
“We keep coming back to the idea of facials because while writing, I was interested in creating a narrative that was like skin, in that it expands and contracts,” Tillman said. “That’s part of the sensibility of the novel, and that’s basically how tangents should work in any kind of writing: going away from something but then later coming back.”
The passage read by Tillman made it clear that the non-linear narrative of “American Genius” remains experimental without sacrificing moments of piercing and witty critique of the American elite.
“The issue of sensitivity is very important in the novel,” said Tillman. “We’ve all become so much more sensitive to toxicity in the environment, but at same time less concerned with other people’s feelings. People are becoming progressively more concerned with their skin and what they’re eating, but at the same time, we’re living in a very cruel time.”
The lack of a tightly plotted, linear narrative was a challenge for listeners, and a few students in the audience were clearly struggling to follow Tillman’s untraditional storytelling. However, during a question-and-answer session, Tillman was willing to address the relationship between her writing and her audience.
“Writing isn’t about thinking you might lose your readers,” she said. “It’s about staying true to what you want to achieve.”
“I was impressed at the communication between the writer and the audience,” said Matthew Shea ’08. “She was just really open to interpretations about her readings.”
Besides playing with the writer-audience relationship, Tillman’s eagerness to toy with the very physics of language also effectively gestured at the human mind in all its complexity.
“Her work had the tangential quality of an inner monologue, but it kept coming back onto itself,” said Nikhil Melnechuk ’07. “It made it hard, but easy to follow.”
Tillman also admitted that the intimate, inner-monologue quality of her work sometimes causes her readers to confuse the line between fact and fiction.
“Once I did a reading and I read a first-person story about Marilyn Monroe during the last three days of her life,” she said, “This lady in the audience became very concerned and asked me afterwards how did I manage to get past all of those terrible experiences.”
As excerpts from “American Genius” illustrated, the basis for Tillman’s writings are both tragic and comedic experiences. In one sentence, the freewheeling narrator wondered if she was a victim of child abuse; in the next sentence, she revealed that the abuse was her father peeing before her. As Tillman jumped along, a comprehensible plot may have been tough to find, but the energetic wit and charisma shone through.
“I think what Lynne Tillman does with her writing is build a container which her ideas then want to escape from, as though her writing doesn’t quite want to stay contained within itself,” said Assistant Professor of English Matthew Sharpe. “Grace Paley once wrote that lucky for art, life is unclear. What Lynn Tillman ends up doing is beautifully representing life in all its un-clarity.”
Leave a Reply