- What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
What would Lynne Tillman do? Last year, this question was mysteriously wheat-pasted on posters all over Lower Manhattan, giving a visual aid to many an art student’s obsession with author Lynne Tillman. Tillman flies under the radar. Her first book, Weird Fucks, can be found almost nowhere (Amazon has one copy; it retails for $200), odds are Oprah will never invite her to join her book club, and Tillman’s fiction will probably never see a fancy, major-studio film treatment. And yet, the trajectory of American literature would almost certainly be a whole lot more boring without her.
In the same way that abstract art throws out figuration, Tillman’s writing isn’t plot-driven; it’s most alive in the minds of her characters and her precise, sharp-edged prose. Take the first sentence of “The Substitute,” from her fiction collection Someday This Will Be Funny: “She watched his heart have a small fit under his black T-shirt.” Every word in that sentence feels weighted and tangible, and conveys information about the story’s characters—nothing is superfluous. Every sentence in “The Substitute” is like this. If you’ve ever felt like an author was dragging you along against your will as you plodded through a 200-page novel, Tillman is the writer for you. It never feels like she’s wasting your time. This is an effect that takes painstaking effort to achieve, and it’s all too rare in contemporary fiction.