FICTION IN REVIEW

1 6 3 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W C A L E B S M I T H Lynne Tillman is a creature of the New York art world, and reading a new collection of her stories is a little like walking through a gallery show. Here are twenty-one discrete works, in a sequence. Knowing that someone, the artist or her curator, has decided to arrange them this way, you might observe the order of presentation. Several of the pieces are complex and demanding. Others are smaller, simpler in their beauty or their charm. This one might give you an awkward feeling. That one might just leave you cold. You might be tempted to skip around. There is no single narrative arc to follow through Someday This Will Be Funny. Even within the individual stories, the matter of plot seems much less important than the concepts and questions that Tillman finds herself thinking about. A few lines from her best book, the 2002 collection This Is Not It, might come close to providing a statement of her approach: ‘‘Stories, in fact, are contained within thought. It’s only a story really should read, it’s a way to think.’’ A story, for Tillman, is not a morality play or a tale S o m e d a y T h i s W i l l B e F u n n y , by Lynne Tillman (Red Lemonade, 160 pp., $14.95 paper) 1 6 4 S M I T H Y of the passions. It is not primarily an occasion to engage in politics, through allegory or social critique; ‘‘I’m not good at being a pawn of history,’’ one of Tillman’s narrators acknowledges. Instead, a story is a conceptual exercise. An experiment in the capacity of language, used with care, to bear the weight of a restless, sometimes troubled mind. A mind which understands that this support is imperfect and precarious, but which also knows that there is probably no better one. ‘‘To be honest, love, sometimes words are all I need.’’ A way to think. Tillman works in prose, occasionally in a collage form that includes verse, quotations, and aphoristic fragments. Her pieces invite the kind of thinking that is usually associated with poems and pictures; they seem not so much developed in time as composed in space. In This Is Not It, she prefaced each story with a reproduction of another artist’s visual work, encouraging readers to think of her writing as a form of commentary or collaboration. There are no illustrations in Someday This Will Be Funny, but there are many reflections on images and image-making. In ‘‘The Original Impulse,’’ for instance, an exchange between a writer and a photographer raises a lingering, unanswered question: ‘‘Outside, the bare branches of February trees looked like what he was saying , an image she might have shot once – recognizable metaphors, a formally interesting composition – but what did it really do. What was it a picture of.’’ One of the most fascinating pieces in Tillman’s new book is ‘‘Impression of an Artist, with Haiku: A Portrait of Peter Dreher.’’ The subject is a German painter who, since 1974, has made several thousand images of the same simple object for a series titled Day by Day, Days Are Good. Dreher has long been a source of fascination for Tillman. She interviewed him for BOMB magazine in 1996, and his pictures are featured in This Is Not It. In ‘‘Impression of an Artist,’’ she imagines her way into his mind. ‘‘By now he was in his studio, staring at a water glass. He had looked at it for more than thirty years, the very same glass. Some people thought he was crazy. But he was only beginning to see it, or he kept seeing it di√erently and he tried to depict that, how it changed, how his capacity changed, and he himself changed over the years. He didn’t mean to paint an autobiography, but he was, also.’’ An image, no less than a story, is a way to think. The painter does...