Someday This Will Be Funny

Author Lynne Tillman knows how to bend a sentence for all it's worth so that from clause to clause, myriad changes or elaborations of meaning can occur. The slinky sentences of Someday This Will Be Funny are marvels of language. "Her analyst didn't smoke," she writes in "The Substitute," "at least not with her, and she didn't imagine he smoked at home, with his wife, whose office was next door, she discovered, unwittingly, not ever having considered that the woman in the adjoining office was more than a colleague." Tillman fans will recognize this as the voice of Helen, the narrator of her novel American Genius. Like her, the other characters in this collection are all captured with the author's trademark quirks and odd logic as Tillman skillfully loops around and through subjects like commitment, unrequited desire, and art. Perhaps the most unusual story in the collection is "Love Sentence," a narrative with a traditional plot arc about a timid girl named Paige that combines quote collage, epistolary form, and theory. It's the story that best encapsulates what makes Tillman so special: a formal fearlessness that doesn't make her fiction opaque but instead renders the complexity of her characters with absolute clarity.