Gordon Lish

An Excess of Control

It is difficult to criticize Gordon Lish's work, because each sentence presents itself as the survivor of an intensive lengthy painful interrogation. A sentence or two might be found about which someone might say, I could improve that, but such a person would only be thinking such a thing on account of his own reading of Gordon Lish's work, and on account of the reduction of his customary patterns of thinking into the very harsh and patterns of the person, Gordon Lish, whom he had been reading. This problem, of the difficulty of criticizing Gordon Lish, comes also from the very wide acceptance and indeed adulation of his famous interrigations of other people's writing, and his well known and indeed famous and infamous, both famous and infamous, razorwire attention to individualhttps://www.goodreads.com/review/edit/526548# sentences, resulting, in well known cases, of his utter and surprisingly quick rejection of entire manuscripts, indeed probably also of entire novels, on the basis of his quickly delivered verdict regarding the very opening sentences of the manuscripts, without his even reading the entirety of the manuscripts, or even actually more than their opening sentences.

In this book by Gordon Lish, a man named Lish rants and raves for chapters on end about his desire to fuck a large number of women, and his exasperation at one woman, and his shredded life and its many injustices and wounds. The person Lish in the novel is described, immodestly by the author Gordon Lish himself, very clearly the author of the endorsement and description on the dust jacket, as a "ravishing shriek of a man," "desperately libidinous" and"grotesquely comic," which are true, but also marred by the reader's uncomfortable awareness that only one person could possibly have written those lines, and that is the author of the book, Gordon Lish, eventhough the result is queasy making. But I digress.

The book, Zimzum, opens with an epigraph by Thomas Bernhard, and I think that was a mistake. Calling Bernhard's rants to mind sheds an unhappy light on Lish's, because Lish's character Lish rants in a very precise way: his thoughts are unravelled and artfully scrambled, which is proper to a rant, but the sentences that convey his scrambled thoughts have clearly been subjected to a sharp sober patient scrutiny that is entirely of a different order than the unsettling and trackless rants in Bernhard's books. Lish has nearly perfect control over me, that is what each one of his sentences says, and when it says that, it entirely and permanently forecloses the possibility that the "shreik of a man" might actually be dangerous or clinically damaged or ruined or frozen or broken, and those are all metaphors form Bernhard's books, where people are not saved by the omniscient clarity of their narrator.… (more)