elimae

A Review of Gordon Lish's Epigraph
Brian Evenson

Near the end of his life, 18th century writer Tobias Smollett confessed that his greatest difficulties had resulted from his being both a writer and an editor--those who he offended as an editor were always willing to take their frustrations out against his books. Gordon Lish, whom Don Delillo has called a man "famous for all the wrong reasons" has perhaps had similar difficulties, his reputation as an editor obscuring and sometimes stifling his reputation as a writer. Nevertheless, though currently still known for all the wrong reasons, with Epigraph Lish has a shot of being recognized for the right ones.
In Epigraph, a character by the name of Gordon Lish -- though this Lish should not be confused either with the real life Lish or with the Lish of Lish's earlier books, despite biographical similarities -- is struggling to avoid facing the fact of his wife's demise after a long and difficult illness. In partial recoil, he becomes fixated on the details surrounding his wife's death. When these become too revealing he falls back to the relative safety of querying points of hyphenation and grammar, looking at the language so as to avoid looking too closely at what he knows the language is saying. Spending his time reclined in the machine in which his wife died, he writes letters to the organizations who have helped him with her illness, tries by mail to hit on his wife's nurses, responds to the court's request that his deceased wife report for jury duty, slowly writing himself mad as all that he has repressed surges to the surface.
The writing here is careful and consummate, the situation at once moving and shocking-- almost the literary equivalent of desecrating a grave. As the novel approaches its close, there begins to develop an elaborate dance of guilt and madness, of memory and desire, as Lish is threatened by all that wells up from the past. In such a short-circuiting, however, lies the only sort of salvation possible to the character Lish: to move through madness and burst through the other side, to continue to write letters with a little more (perhaps temporary) calm, to go on in the face of death. Whatever one thinks of Lish as an editor, Epigraph is a powerful novel.

This review was originally published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction