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In 1999, Oprah anointed Bret Lott a Real Writer by selecting his novel Jewel for the Oprah Book Club. Freed from financial worries, the previously unsuccessful Lott could now spend his days at his desk, struggling to make sentences out of "words swirling about him in absurd order, words lined up like drunken soldiers, like harlots with painted lips slurring just as drunkenly as those soldiers he'd thought up."
The Difference |
The stories in Lott's new book, The Difference Between Women and Men, from which those swirling words are taken, depict a world full of women and men who are deeply estranged. In "A Way Through This," a husband insists to his wife that they can get through their difficulties together. He thinks that she agrees with him: "He smiled, astonished at his luck, at the blessing of a wife who could see alongside him the way through this." Meanwhile she is imagining a world without him: "And above everything hung a bright and huge morning sky, a brilliant sky filled with limitless possibilities. … He was gone, vanished into thin air, and she smiled, astonished at her luck, at the blessing of a husband who knew when to leave." Words are incapable of reconciling these drastically different versions of reality. In the title story, a desperate wife responds to her husband's demand that they discuss "the difference between women and men" by silently stacking all of the bedroom furniture in one corner of the room, a symbolic gesture which reduces him to mystified speechlessness.
Actually the gesture mystifies me too. Lott's prose is so apocalyptically awful that it resists interpretation. Here, for example, is the heroine of "Rose," who has just given her unfaithful husband a postcoital glass of bourbon with poison in it: "She had reached to him, taken the glass from him before he might drop it and spoil these sheets, desecrate them with alcohol when they had been so blessed with the beginning of love only moments before, the two still beneath these sheets as all who have loved with a love as deep as she had begun to know ought still to be." (Lott should probably try reading his sentences out loud, a technique I recommend to my freshman comp students, not that they ever actually do it.) And then there is the unnamed narrator of the story "Postscript," who is trying to write even though his wife keeps interrupting him. He just cannot "get these lost and swirling words in line before him in some sort of order so that they might bow to him, might surrender to him perhaps a moon over a midnight lake, that lake flat and black and clean, the surface so smooth that next there might come a second moon just beneath the first, a moon descending into its own black sky, this lake, the higher its sister moon rose over this lake of words he wanted smoothed for him."
Unsnarling these syntactical tangles isn't easy, but the reader who persists will see a pattern slowly emerge. Almost every story involves the kind of disasters common to this fallen existence: car crashes, heart attacks, overdue mortgages, bankruptcy, accidental electrocution (well, that last is probably not so common). But the true catastrophe in Lott's fictional universe is that husbands and wives are always at odds, warring with each other even as their lives collapse around them. The battle of the sexes is the center of his world's fallenness. And if men and women could simply put their differences aside, a new world might dawn.
Consider the story "An Evening on the Cusp of the Apocalypse." The narrator drives home one evening, gloomily contemplating the looming bankruptcy of his company, and finds that his lights and water have been cut off. The family credit cards have been cancelled. The bank has put a lien on the house. And his wife—madly packing a suitcase in the bedroom—tells him that she's having an affair.
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