AMERICA IS A LAND OF BEGINNINGS, impatient, virginal, suspicious of foreplay. Sales are clinched on first impressions; books judged by covers; presidents, on their first one hundred days. The critic, novelist, and short story writer Lynne Tillman is an author who refreshingly resists our national logic of instant gratification. What might initially seem like a “theatrical” tendency to keep the audience at arm’s length soon gives way, as the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín once observed, to something “kinder and more considerate and oddly vulnerable.” In a Tillman story, everything can come together in the final line, and often does. In a land of beginnings, here is a master of elegant endings, the rare writer who can construct entire plots (or rather, “plots”) from false starts. By design, her stories unfold with the knowledge that she may lose some ticket holders at the intermission—but also with the confidence that those who mutiny will be the poorer for it. As usual, Tillman is correct.
In seventeen books over forty years, Tillman has made a career of distorting received narrative forms. Her motivations are as political as they are aesthetic, rooted in her critique of the American penchant for comfort and ease. As a critic,she has argued in favor of the novelist who can seize a “reality most American readers want to avoid—the possibility of failure.” Her own debut novella, Weird Fucks (1980), chronicles repeated romantic misfires with deadpan comedy. Her later narrators are more cerebral, more sensual, and more expert at bending sentences into U-turns, for the sake of both comedy and argument: the shape of the sentence is itself a critique of that other American fetish, progress. In her 2006 novel, American Genius, A Comedy,a woman housed in a mysterious institution—is it rehab, a spa, a sanatorium?—describes the routines that give structure to her free-ranging internal monologues, including a regular evening bath: “I eagerly undress and fill the old-fashioned, footed bathtub with very hot water, pour bath oil under the faucet, three capfuls, which is supposed to invigorate your body, moisturize your skin, and soothe your mind, and though this never happens, my mind is never soothed, I still liberally pour in bath oil that claims to soothe the mind and help the skin.” Taking an action only to immediately strip it of narrative consequence—drawing the bath, disowning the bath, drawing the bath again—places Tillman on the same postmodern spectrum as Beckett’s trilogy, though she falls much closer to the extremes of possibility (“You must go on!”) than of nihilism or abjectness (“I can’t”).
Today, Tillman’s persistent openness to failure—her embrace of chatty tangents over “progress”—is especially notable for never dissipating into mere anxiety or ennui, the contemporary temptations for (and literary manifestations of) which are great. Though we may wander in unexpected directions, we are never standing still, let alone collapsing to the divan. For Tillman is waging subtle war. She is constantly wresting received expectations from the reader, both in terms of how to tell a story, and of how to conceive of ourselves as sexual and political beings. She is wrestling with Freud and “Madame Realism,” her recurring character, alter ego, and coconspirator, who allows her to write art criticism in the form of fiction (or vice versa). She is wrestling with herself: What form to take, as a writer and a person, when the forms tradition has supplied are too narrow to contain all you have in mind?
There’s something hopeful in the very fact of posing this question. It suggests other possibilities exist; the search lives on.
THRILLED TO DEATH COLLECTS FOUR DECADES of previously published stories.For all its experimentations and deconstructions, the book reveals that Tillman has in fact been offering lessons in narrative survival all along. “He wasn’t dead,” as one character realizes with relief, “he was only reading a book.” The goal—as the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky once defined the function of plot—is a kind of “deceleration” meant to keep the story from ending too soon, or at the wrong time. Seen through this lens, Tillman’s restless cul-de-sacs, reversals, and restarts are vital exercises in delay, methods for staving off premature ends. They are a way of cheating time. As the laconic narrator of the opening story, “Come and Go,” muses, “That’s why [Americans] move so much, to escape history.”
Tillman’s unconventional strategies for keeping the narrative in motion are myriad and carnivalesque. The staples of the variety show come to mind: spinning plates, swallowing swords, walking tightropes, juggling pins—hypnotizing games whose very attraction is a taste for danger, including that posed to the performer herself. In “Come and Go,” the author suddenly kills off two conventional protagonists in a budding New York romance in order to clear space for her own arrival: “And then, as if by magic or the stroke of a sword or a pen, they vanished. With that, I came into being.” The sudden turn to first person, occurring two-thirds of the way through the story, is a delightful form of whiplash. Only in retrospect do we see that the humdrum couple, Charles and Emma, had it coming: they met outside an emergency room, after all. The reveal is exemplary of the collection as a whole. Under Tillman’s spell, it often feels—hilariously, restoratively, unnervingly—as if anything could happen at any time.
One reason to kill off narrative conventions like stable character or point of view is that they’ve outlived their use: “I wanted them to go,” our newborn narrator continues, “and I have my reasons. . . . I left them before they left me.” They could carry the story no further. Another is that in this type of intellectual, self-referential fiction, we—the audience to such disappearing acts—should never be allowed to get too comfortable. A tightrope strung across the ground is just another walk in the park; no one comes to the circus to feel at ease.
The carnivalesque has left its greasy fingerprints all over this collection. Without ever breaking the laws of physics, the stories alight on actual carnivals (in a possible nod to John Barth’s postmodern classic “Lost in the Funhouse,” the titular story “Thrilled to Death” takes place at one), Alice in Wonderland, ghosts, puns, past presidents, hoarders, Mikhail Bakhtin (master theorist of the carnivalesque), and the incessant vaudeville of downtown Manhattan. In my favorite story, “The Undiagnosed,” Tillman’s veiled “I” arrives for a masquerade ball dressed in her deceased father’s suit. The other guests wonder over her costume: Is she supposed to be her father? Is she Hamlet? Her father’s ghost? Instead, “dressed as a man,” she is a genderless investigator—a desexed Cinderella whose present state, like the tattered silk upholstery of the “fin-de-siècle” venue, “wouldn’t last.” The costume prompts the masked protagonist to reflect on her limited understanding of masculinity. “I knew men who were dubious about being men,” she reflects, “I knew men who wanted to be women, I knew men who hated women, and those who relished them like succulent meals, I knew men who loved men, I knew men whose best friends were women, I knew men whose fear of vaginas vanquished them (they couldn’t go through tunnels) . . . and on and on.” And yet, for all this, she knows nothing at all about what it’s like to be—poor Hamlet!—an actual man; she knows nothing of “men qua men.” In a comic stroke of good luck (this is a fairy tale, after all), a true expert arrives, like a fairy godmother, to answer all her questions: “The door opened, and Clint Eastwood entered.” The man qua man.
“What do you want to know?” he asks.
I’VE OFTEN THOUGHT short stories are structured more like jokes than like novels or poems. The short story reader anticipates the reveal, the turn, with the same eagerness that the audience at an open mic anticipates a punch line. It’s all about the timing. Tillman is a skilled comic, with an especially deft touch for skewering gender norms. She is also endlessly quotable, packing in a surplus of simple beauty (“Unexpected results from ordinary things are wonderful”) and pure wisecrack-ery (in a chat between two futuristic bots: “—Whoa@! Jokes@? —Extincto”) at the level of the line. Her intellect effervesces in the pun-spiked prose, like circus champagne.
Yet for all the humor, there’s also an unmistakable melancholy to the collection. The carnival is a place for life—“everything’s alive, vital,” chants an old man at the funhouse in “Thrilled to Death”—but it’s a morbid kind of vitality. Again and again, a story’s carnivalesque excesses—its digressions, jokes, dreams, and variety shows—are employed to elegiac ends. The most tender moments often arrive in the final lines. In “The Dead Live Longer,” our ambivalently mournful “I” responds to the death of a friend from whom she’s been estranged for years. The story concludes: “She was out of my life for many, many years, not yet dead, but dead to me figuratively. It’s very different, that kind of death. I learn that with each fresh death.” In “Madame Realism’s Torch Song,” the eponymous protagonist and her beau, a shifty figure named “Wiley,” are unable to come to terms with how to tell a ghost story. Instead, they walk off into the night “in search of shooting stars and other necessary irrelevancies.” Endings like these reveal that “oddly vulnerable” impulse that so often swells beneath Tillman’s clever charm.
In one of the most wrenching stories, “Boots and Remorse,” an animal activist foists a stray cat upon the reluctant narrator, whose friend Craig, we later learn, is dying from aids. One can imagine a more predictable version of this story tucked away somewhere in the New Yorker archives—the narrator’s struggle to care for the stray plays a supporting role in the dominant storyline of the friend’s decline, harmonizing with the overarching themes of compassion and the fragility of life. Tillman’s version is thornier: we spend nearly the entirety of the story’s fourteen pages with the deranged feline, Boots, who descends into madness and begins attacking the narrator when she adopts a second stray named Tuba. (Tuba’s own medical problems are described with deliberate excess: “I telephoned the vet I trusted—she had discovered what four others had not: Tuba had an obstruction that was causing his constipation, which meant he had to eat baby food mixed with fiber softener for the rest of his life.”) There are extended scenes with a pet therapist, exacting descriptions of claw wounds in human flesh, and other deep cuts from the annals of pet care that deliberately try the reader’s patience. Yet by the end, the narrator’s commitment to tedium, and her aversion to sentimentality, reveal themselves to be a tender, even desperate, form of eulogy—an admission of failure in matters of rescue or care. Craig’s awful absence from the story is his absence from her life. (Tillman’s own friend and colleague Craig Owens, the former Art in America editor who first commissioned her Madame Realism essay-fictions for the magazine,passed away in 1990.) To write around the loss is an act of loyalty, as if the narrator couldn’t bring herself to do him in a second time, in death by cliché—or overexposure. As Tillman has written elsewhere, “Any writer knows that what’s left out is as essential, if not more so, than what’s there.”
TO RESIST DEATH AND KEEP OUR FRIENDS ALIVE are among the very best reasons to write. Tillman shows us how, through a legerdemain of absence, swerve, perpetual motion, and delay. If she ever appears hostile to linear narrative, it’s in the manner by which we criticize most those we love best: we want better for them. But Tillman is also aware of the inevitable trade-offs. Constant digression can make it difficult to sustain or relax into any one emotion. In matters of romance, especially, the mode of elliptical anti-progress—of keeping all the plates spinning, all the balls in the air at once—made me reflect on the occasional temptation to surrender, nevertheless, to more traditional narrative comforts.
It’s a temptation not even these puckish stories can escape and is in fact part of what drives them. “For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers,” begins Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse.” Not really: throughout Tillman’s collection, characters are at once drawn to and repelled by the temporary loss of control—another kind of death?—that falling in love and funhouses require. In “The Substitute,” Helen, a professor who is infatuated with her married psychoanalyst, waffles over a stand-in love interest in the form of a man named Rex. “The urge to give herself” to Rex is “weirdly compelling,” but she is likewise convinced that sex will only “hasten the end, like a death sentence for promise.” The affair is exciting only because of the risk of surrender, the possibility of giving “more than she’d planned,” and indeed Helen loses interest immediately after consummating it. “She wondered if she should find another man,” she reflects, “one she couldn’t have.”
The analyst, notably, also becomes bored as soon as she’s given in. Before Helen and Rex have sex, she brings Dr. Kaye their “story . . . in installments, four times a week,” when she has him “hanging on her words.” Afterward, he seems to lose interest.
Tillman’s stories are deeply invested in the idea of danger and fantasy as prerequisites to narrative thrill—but what’s good for the story often proves fatal for love. The pattern is repeated in the titular “Thrilled to Death,” where characters weigh the risks and rewards of romance while a lone gunman roams through the carnival. After a cop proposes to his girlfriend from the heights of the Ferris wheel, they return to land (“Terra firma,” says the cop, “nothing like it”) for cotton candy and hot dogs where, in a gesture premonitory of the banal intimacies of marriage, the newly minted fiancée (who wants “nothing more than to live dangerously”) wipes mustard off his face: “Maybe she really loves him. It’s hard to tell.” Among the rides and neon lights, another woman, named “Paige Turner,” falls “like Alice” into a contradictory wonderland where “All her passions are allowed. She may repeat herself, endlessly. She can hold on and hold on, resist nothing, everything, and defend herself constantly.” Upon her own return to terra firma, she accompanies a man on a “ride through the Soul Tunnel of Love,” where she “relishes the fantasy of being strange with a stranger.” Not long after the carnival concludes, however, back in real life, she breaks off their relationship “out of the blue.” “It was a fantasy,” she explains, “and now it’s not anymore.” Terra firma kills the narrative. And yet attachment to fantasy—to the place where “all her passions are allowed”—kills love.
Tillman offers a poignant reflection on an age-old paradox: the lover is drawn to endless possibility and stability at once. Her formulation of it is designed to leave you feeling split. Must love always be thwarted for the fictional fantasy to survive? Or is it also part of the representational challenge, in fiction, to give our attachments duration—for a time? Reading Thrilled to Death, I hoped that standing still, too, might yet prove another mode of narrative survival. But these longings were immediately unpopular with the part of me that surrendered fully to Tillman’s world. “Are you really after marriage plots, doe-eyed romance, God forbid, women’s fiction?” this dissenting voice accused. “Is this what your ancestors came to the land of Coney Island for?” Tillman’s funhouse will warp your reflection, rearrange your brain. She’ll send you home disoriented, dizzy, and ultimately free, clutching, like a sweaty raffle ticket, an enduring Madame Real-ism: “What I love most I can’t control.”
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of the novels The Exhibition of Persephone Q (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) and The Visitors (2022) as well as the story collection Ghost Pains (2024; both And Other Stories), a finalist for the 2025 Story Prize.