The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Arcade, Or How to Write a Novel by Gordon Lish
Alan Tinkler

Gordon Lish. Arcade, or How to Write a Novel. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998. 175 pp. $22.00.

One of Arcade’s three epigraphs is from Gilles Deleuze: “In the game of becoming, the being of becoming also plays the game with itself.” Gordon Lish’s Arcade explores both becoming as well as being, by way of a wonderful carnival of language, a language that shifts from playful to potent as frequently as Lish, the author, employs uncanny syntactical shifts.
Lish, the narrator, crawls through language and its limitations to understand the world around him, starting with his remembrance of his family’s annual vacation to Laurel in the Pines where Gordon, as a child, quests after “Buried Treasure” underneath the sand in the arcade game, and finishing with his recognition, as an aged author, of the quandaries associated with fiction which include, though are not limited to, readers’ expectations, authorial intent, and the factual/fictional binary of “autobiographical” fiction. After ranting about the vicarious nature of readers on page eighty-five, Lish decides, “Because I Gordon am fed up to the gills,” to leave the next twenty pages blank. In the end, more than forty pages are left blank, at times even losing the pagination, relying simply on a small dot beside the absent page number.
The one disappointment of the novel is the rate of acceleration. The novel moves too quickly from childhood where Lish is particularly adept at making the syntactical shifts work to his advantage. Later, and too quickly, comes bitterness, “It makes me glad I’m the last of the Lishes. They can all of them go thank their lucky stars they did not live to see the state the English language is in.” Ironically, Arcade finally is less about How to Write a Novel than Lish’s attempt to remind readers of the joys of languages particularly since it is through language that we all discover ourselves and the world in which we live.
Near the end of the novel, in a belated epigraph, Lish quotes Alphonso Lingis: “What is the imperative in things and the imperative that we have to perceive things? The imperative is nothing less than what is commonly called life.” Gordon Lish should be commended; Arcade is Lish at his best. [Alan Tinkler]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Arcade, Or How to Write a Novel by Gordon Lish Alan Tinkler Gordon Lish. Arcade, or How to Write a Novel. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998. 175 pp. $22.00. One of Arcade’s three epigraphs is from Gilles Deleuze: “In the game of becoming, the being of becoming also plays the game with itself.” Gordon Lish’s Arcade explores both becoming as well as being, by way of a wonderful carnival of language, a language that shifts from playful to potent as frequently as Lish, the author, employs uncanny syntactical shifts. Lish, the narrator, crawls through language and its limitations to understand the world around him, starting with his remembrance of his family’s annual vacation to Laurel in the Pines where Gordon, as a child, quests after “Buried Treasure” underneath the sand in the arcade game, and finishing with his recognition, as an aged author, of the quandaries associated with fiction which include, though are not limited to, readers’ expectations, authorial intent, and the factual/fictional binary of “autobiographical” fiction. After ranting about the vicarious nature of readers on page eighty-five, Lish decides, “Because I Gordon am fed up to the gills,” to leave the next twenty pages blank. In the end, more than forty pages are left blank, at times even losing the pagination, relying simply on a small dot beside the absent page number. The one disappointment of the novel is the rate of acceleration. The novel moves too quickly from childhood where Lish is particularly adept at making the syntactical shifts work to his advantage. Later, and too quickly, comes bitterness, “It makes me glad I’m the last of the Lishes. They can all of them go thank their lucky stars they did not live to see the state the English language is in.” Ironically, Arcade finally is less about How to Write a Novel than Lish’s attempt to remind readers of the joys of languages particularly since it is through language that we all discover ourselves and the world in which we live. Near the end of the novel, in a belated epigraph, Lish quotes Alphonso Lingis: “What is the imperative in things and the imperative that we have to perceive things? The imperative is nothing less than what is commonly called life.” Gordon Lish should be commended; Arcade is Lish at his best. [Alan Tinkler]

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