Portrait of Lynne Tillman by Stephen Ellis, 2006, 20×14”. Courtesty of the artist.

Lynne Tillman’s new novel, her fifth, feels epic even though much of its “action” takes place inside the protagonist’s head. American Genius, A Comedy is about someone establishing the limits of her world, her freedom, thought by thought—and for Tillman thinking is the most active of states. Battles are waged here between one sentence and the next; major events like having breakfast or getting a facial treatment (not to mention reliving a painful childhood, trying to make sense of American territorial expansion, or revisiting the history of the Manson Family) crop up and work themselves out with the insistence of a twenty-first-century fugue. It’s a work of singular ambition that is not afraid to make demands on the reader, whose own thinking is yanked into the book’s process at every turn.

In her novels, stories, and essays—although with Tillman the limits of genre and category are breached in unexpected ways—she has been a vital force for two decades. Books like Haunted Houses (1987), Absence Makes the Heart (1990), Motion Sickness (1991), Cast in Doubt (1992), No Lease on Life (1998), and This Is Not It (2002) are experimental writing in the truest sense. In language that is direct and devoid of ornament, Tillman explores different possibilities of point of view and narrative structure, reconfiguring the world with the turn of a sentence. Her many stories written in response to works of art are only one aspect of her continual invention of forms. A sense of humor that is pure New York provides a constant pulse in her writing.

I met with Lynne in her East Village apartment in July to discuss American Genius, A Comedy. We’ve talked many times over the years, ever since we both wrote for the Village Voice back in the ‘80s, but this was the first time we had discussed her writing and its aims at such length. American Genius, A Comedy is out from Soft Skull Press this fall.

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Issue 97 Fall 2006