The Brooklyn Rail

In one of the stories in Thrilled to Death, a newly published selection of stories from her singular career, Lynne Tillman describes Clint Eastwood as “a tall, lean man, who seemed he would never fall, like the Twin Towers.” I tried to figure out when the story was first published; I found it in a book published in 2006 and one published in 2002, which got me in the neighborhood but still leaves the question open. I would hazard a guess, though, that it was written no earlier than the fall of 2001. It’s a very Lynne Tillman joke: only funny because it’s sad. (A novel of hers is called American Genius, A Comedy and on a podcast, I heard her say that she wishes Trump had just become a comedian instead.)

Tillman has said, in an interview with The Believer, that she agrees with what Freud thought of the relationship between jokes and the unconscious, “which is that jokes come to help us. We laugh so as to dispense with, or to express, some ambivalence or discomfort with the things around us. That’s what laughing is: a release. Laughing and crying are very similar.” Her sentences often take one turn more than expected, which can be used to comic or tragic effect. Both possibilities are on display in this passage from the first story in the collection, “Come and Go”:

Emma’s hair, in the light, was even more purple, but it would fade, everything fades. Yoji had done the best he could, his best was better than most, but he didn’t understand lavender. She didn’t understand people’s love of purple prose, she preferred porn, but there was none in her apartment.

Tillman has a fondness for this kind of paradox—the way opposites tend to collapse in on themselves. In her stories, fiction and reality have a tendency to give way to one another. “Ironic coincidence is common as mud in actual life but appears less often in fiction because it might seem contrived,” she writes, gesturing to the less-than-straightforward relationship between life and fiction, though her fiction has no shortage of ironic coincidence (which never seems contrived, but only more lifelike). “Come and Go” starts as the story of a handful of city dwellers but is revealed, in the third section, to be meta-fiction, the characters the creation of a hitherto-hidden narrator. Of one character in the story, the narrator writes, “she was a thought, who had to be called something in order to exist.” Tillman once wrote that “books are not mirrors, and life doesn’t go onto the page like life, but like writing,” (a recurring character of Tillman’s is named Paige Turner). On the other hand, the narrator of one story in this collection claims that, “if life differs from novels, it’s mostly in the management of time and incident.” Anyway, reality has its own uncanny quality, its own surreal humor.

This shifting narration and a slippery sense of reality and genre is characteristic of the book, whose stories are unlinked (though characters sometimes recur, as with Tillman’s Madame Realism, a meta-fictional art critic) and arranged associatively rather than chronologically. Some of the stories are told in a close, rotating third-person; some are from a first-person vantage that seems quite close to the author’s, sharing her name, her friends and lovers, her life history, her cat; some from a vantage quite different; and one, memorably, who has “spent a good part of my writing life designing characters so unlike my family that people actually think my pen name, Lynne Tillman, is my real name.” They are set in New York City, in London, in Amsterdam, in unspecified small cities and other nameless places. But it feels, fundamentally, of and about city life, in the way Mrs. Dalloway does. The book, like the city, is a place where innumerable human consciousnesses (fictional as they are, Tillman’s characters have an irrepressible humanity) stream past each other and stack on top of one another.

As laughing and crying, fiction and reality give way to one another, so do dream worlds and conscious ones (another point of agreement with Freud). In the story “Tiny Struggles,” the main character “fed his fantasies, starting one, replaying it, she’s on her knees, starting another, staring at the huge blue sky, sun still a flaming red ball. The new version fails to start, he can’t get it started, but how can he fail at his own fantasy?” In Tillman’s stories, dreams and fantasies are recounted again and again. And as Dr. Kaye, the analyst in “The Substitute,” knows, “there is truth in fantasy,” which, of course, makes it not quite so fantastic. “Dreams signify nothing to anyone else,” Tillman writes, “and their accidental meetings were psychic jokes”—they too, that is, come from the unconscious to help us understand.

“Your ambivalence will concoct dreams beyond your wildest wishes,” a psychic tells a character in the collection’s titular final story. For Tillman, ambivalence is also what jokes dispense with, or express—and “all bearers of wishes and jokes are also serious.” I saw Tillman at a reading recently; she sat at attention in the front row while another writer read from a short story that was funny and sad in turns. At one point, Tillman alone laughed at something that wasn’t obviously a punch line. After the reading, a friend I was with, seeming slightly anxious on Tillman’s behalf, said, “She was the only one laughing.” Yes, I thought. But it was funny.