{"id":70904,"date":"2014-05-07T15:39:50","date_gmt":"2014-05-07T19:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=70904"},"modified":"2014-05-08T11:22:10","modified_gmt":"2014-05-08T15:22:10","slug":"remembering-thomas-glynn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/07\/remembering-thomas-glynn\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Thomas Glynn"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"glynn<\/a><\/p>\n

We\u2019re saddened to report that Thomas Glynn, a writer whose keen, mordant fiction appeared in The Paris Review<\/em>, The New Yorker<\/em>, and Playboy<\/em>, died last weekend. When we say that very little is known about him, we mean that very little is googleable about him\u2014having largely managed to evade the Internet\u2019s All-Seeing Eye, Glynn has taken on a quasimythical obscurity. As of this writing, he hasn\u2019t received a proper obituary.<\/p>\n

We know he published three novels\u00ad\u2014Temporary Sanity<\/em><\/a> (1977), The Building<\/em><\/a> (1985), and Watching the Body Burn<\/em><\/a> (1989)\u2014the latter two with Knopf and the former with Fiction Collective. All three were well reviewed, and all three have fallen out of print. Later came a kind of hybrid called Hammer. Nail. Wood. The Compulsion to Build<\/em><\/a> (1998), whose back cover recommends filing it under Home Reference\/Nonfiction\/Building. But its chapter titles imply a more contemplative blend of service and supposition. (E.g., \u201cIron and wood,\u201d \u201cSex and wood,\u201d \u201cDo you really need a second floor?\u201d \u201cPut your fist through it and see if it\u2019s still standing,\u201d \u201cTools you may need and some you might not,\u201d \u201cHow fast is a running foot?\u201d and \u201cThe ruin of a perfectly good junkyard.\u201d)<\/p>\n

As those suggest, Glynn had a knack for titles. His three stories in The Paris Review<\/em> were called \u201cExcept for the Sickness I\u2019m Quite Healthy Now. You Can Believe That,\u201d \u201cApond\u00e9, the Magnificent Times Two<\/a>,\u201d and \u201cIf I Don\u2019t Phone, I\u2019ll Call, or Something.\u201d The first of those appeared in our 2012 anthology, Object Lessons<\/em><\/a>, where it was introduced by Jonathan Lethem: \u201cFor Glynn, language may be the color blue that\u2019s used in the place of all other colors: the paint that won\u2019t actually let you see the painting, but can do absolutely anything you need it to do anyway.\u201d <\/p>\n

Hammer<\/em>\u2019s brief biographical note says that Glynn lived in Brooklyn and upstate New York. He wrote that he sometimes took on work as a carpenter:<\/p>\n

\n

I was looking for the perfect carpentry job, the job where the wood went together on the site as it had in my mind. Copernican carpentry with Aristotelian angles where the ideal and the real became one. This did not happen. One could be perfect in steel, one had to be perfect in steel, but wood \u2026 wood was too human. Wood swayed the way the mind swayed; it changed, warped, twisted, cracked, was full of hidden knots and recesses, cavities you couldn\u2019t see on the surface the way you couldn\u2019t see how the mind bubbled up strange conclusions when put under stress.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

New Yorker <\/em>subscribers can read Glynn\u2019s 1981 story \u201cUncles<\/a>\u201d online. His disused Web site<\/a> avers that \u201chis eighteen-hundred-page novel on the first one hundred and fifty years of Dannemora prison, called The Cathedral of Time<\/i>, is currently in the archives at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.\u201d We\u2019re grateful for any information or memories our readers can share about him.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re saddened to report that Thomas Glynn, a writer whose keen, mordant fiction appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Playboy, died last weekend. 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