The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Self-Imitation of Myself by Gordon LishBrian Evenson
Gordon Lish. Self-Imitation of Myself. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998. 335 pp. $22.00.
Gordon Lish’s Self-Imitation of Myself is his first entirely new collection of short fiction since Mourner at the Door. Clocking in at forty-six stories and 335 pages, it’s also his largest and most varied. Although a few of the stories at first seem less strong than others, the volume as a whole shows Lish to be an edgy and capable writer willing to put pressure on fictional convention so as to call the notion of “story” into question.
The stories in Self-Imitation range from formal experiments, similar in some respects to those found in Mourner, to more sustained narratives. There are narratives that are extended jokes, a story about being in love with a dog named Beatrice, numbered narratives, a fiction modeled after a card game, a fiction based on a recipe, epistolary fiction, a fiction based on permutations of a philosophical statement, short brittle pieces that seem to be extensions of Lish’s novels, terse little short shorts (such as the very fine “Konkluding Labor of Herkules”), a fish story, and a story in a subway, just to name a few.
Many of these pieces establish a form and then cause it to collapse or turn against itself in a way not unlike the strangest of Beckett’s Fizzles. Lish establishes an utterance and then takes it apart, the subject of the fiction shifting to notions of storytelling and aesthetics. A few pieces, however, such as the playful “Fangle or Fire” or the very European “Traveling Man,” establish a more sustained narrative and carry a character forward in complex and eloquent fashion. In these self-sabotaging pieces Lish shows himself adept at moving from level to level; in the second he proves he can stay on one level and move forward. In either he remains a quirky and shrewd writer, at once exasperating and effective. [Brian Evenson]