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GORDON LISH Gordon Lish is perhaps best known for his role as editor for the late Raymond Carver. For an instructive example of the importance of good editing, check out The New Yorker online, which in December 2007 featured an early draft of Carver’s story ‘Beginners’ with all of Lish’s corrections and deletions intact. You can see exactly how Lish transformed a rambling, shapeless mess of a tale into a jewel of minimalist storytelling. Lish has also published fifteen or so works of his own fiction, though when I asked around I couldn’t find anyone who’d actually read any of his books. Online reviews of his work are polarized; here’s a guy you either love or you hate. Or who maybe you really, really hate. But no one feels lukewarm about the guy, and that always intrigues me. After plowing through most of his books, the one thing I can say for sure is that this stuff is pretty strange. It’s kind of like if Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard spawned a child and that child grew up to be a paranoid schizophrenic who is now at this moment sitting next to you in the bus shelter yammering your ear off and you really want to get up and move but it’s pouring rain and you don’t want to get wet and Jesus Christ where the hell is that bus it should have been here fifteen minutes ago. Know what I’m saying? Do you actually know what it is I’m saying to you? Are you listening to me? It’s kind of like that. Lish loves to blur the line between fiction and reality. His narrators are nearly always named Gordon Lish, though I’m not sure if they’re modeled on the actual Gordon Lish. If so, I wonder about the guy’s sanity (he has often claimed to have spent time “in the bughouse”, which is not hard to believe). The Gordon Lishes narrating the stories are as confrontational and demanding as the stories themselves, often hurling questions directly at the reader: What, do you think I am joking? What makes you think I could possibly be joking? Don’t make me laugh! As I read I found myself constantly questioning whether this guy actually is mentally ill or just unusually gifted at writing as if he were. And if the latter is true, then why the hell is he doing it? I don’t know. Like I said, it’s strange stuff. Despite its challenges, I find his work more intriguing than irritating. Lish has an excellent feel for the rhythms of language; he is best read aloud, though perhaps in private, as his narrators tend to be obsessed with sex. His book Zimzum (more like a couple of loosely-connected stories thrown haphazardly together than a proper novel) features one section that is little more than a list of women the narrator has had sex with as well as what sexual acts he committed with them and where. It’s filthy and repugnant and hysterical. I mean hysterical in both senses of the word, for along with being emotionally volatile, the Gordon Lishes delivering these monologues can also be very funny. Lish has a terrific sense of comic timing, and could be considered an heir to a long line of Jewish comedians. This is most apparent in his novel Extravaganza (appropriately subtitled “A Joke Book”), which consists entirely of shtick exchanged between two members of a Jewish vaudeville act. As the book progresses (regresses?) the banter becomes increasingly creepy and surreal, peppered with anti-Semitism and senseless acts of violence, until you wonder if these two schlubs have been damned to eternally perform their act in some comedy club in Hell. Like much of his work, it’s ugly, it’s brutal, and it makes me feel deeply uncomfortable. But hey, isn’t that what art is supposed to do? Isn’t that what art is fucking meant to do? Isn’t it? |
