Asunder Paperback – November 16, 2010

Whatever you love about Beckett, you'll appreciate about Lopez in these stories told by damaged narrators covering array from the socially inept to the psychosocial. And and the converse is equally true. No matter what, his writing is clear and while it comes off as smooth and offhand, you can appreciate that each line has been polished to efface the effort.I loved "Everyone out of the Pool", beginning with "The closest thing to tumbleweed in New York City are the people." It's a line that could set off down the track to sharp intuition or ski jump right off into empty writing workshop conceits. For me, that was the pitfall of many of the stories, where the narrators are clearly in a state of "asunder", but I didn't care. At some point, a story about idiots told by an idiot stops feeling profound and either I'm an idiot for not getting the point, or I'm simply bored. Since I'm not in grad school anymore, I get to be bored and don't have to finish my Derrida if I don't want to.There are some great lines in this collection, and maybe I am too dim to see or weak-lunged to pearl dive deeper the hidden treasures. I think he's a really good writer. I got the feeling he's got the literary establishment sitting in his head as he wrote some of these stories is all.

Lopez has a really distinct philosophy and style when it comes to writing, starting with an interesting first sentence and then going from there. His stories build with the use of a lot of repetition of words and phrases. The writing is what I would call "stylistic" in that it really draws attention to itself and distinguishes itself from more common and unremarkable prose styles. Of note in this collection is a story entitled "Priapism" that I find to be really good, both hilarious yet very thoughtful. There's also a novella in the back that really showcases the repetitive style more overtly. I'd recommend the book to people who are interested in really distinct literary fiction.