Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The transcendent quirkiness of Lish's stylerepetitive, meandering, self-referentialbrings to life a series of childhood summers in what may be his most accessible, funniest novel to date. Sore feet up on a pillow, Lish's aged narrator (named Gordon) goes on and on, winningly, about an arcade he visited at a sort of bungalow colony during his youth and about the extended family with whom he spent those long-ago vacations. Tiny memories spin, recurring, collecting resonance: a dirty ceiling grate seen through a hole in some strudel dough; the grapple bucket of an arcade game; an early sexual experience. Of the "cruel" lilies lining a pathway, Gordon recalls: "These tall scared-looking things, like they were going to faint and fall down and, you know, and kill peoplelike they were wounded or something or had a fever or something and wanted to kill people or something. It's too complicated. You probably don't have the brains for it." To punch up his comic, curmudgeonly harangues (indebted most obviously to Stein, Beckett's Malone and the cheesy "Americanola" dialect of Lish's late comrade-in-arms, Harold Brodkey), Lish (Dear Mr. Capote, etc.) goes so far as to interpolate blank pages of sheer fury, frustration or elegiac dumbfoundedness; elsewhere he bullies and cajoles the reader into experiencing directly the slippery power of memory and words. Even when he treats his narrator's nostalgia as an absurdity, an exercise in kitsch, the notorious editor and fiction guru brings surprising pathos to his histrionic remembrance of summers past. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Lish (Self-Imitation of Myself, LJ 10/15/97) is a well-known American author and editor, but this "novel," which seems to be more internal monolog and memoir, will add little that is positive to his reputation. The title refers to his memories of being the youngest cousin at family gatherings at Laurel in the Pines, when all the boy cousins left before Aunt Lily brought out her strudel because they wanted to operate the vending machines that allowed them to "dig" for treasures. The reader learns that Lish is small of stature but well endowed with both vocabulary and male genitalia. Aside from that, his achievement is making Woody Allen seem less neurotic and self-absorbed in comparison. In his attempt to be experimental, Lish leaves a section of pages blank; he never sheds the slightest clue as to how to write a novel. Not recommended.Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Lishs most brilliant to date (Epigraph, 1996,etc.), a Lishs Complaint that travels in a single breath from childhood to an aging novelists exhausted plaint at a fickle readership. In early childhood, Gordon (I am the only Lish who isnt dead), went with his family for a vacation at Laurel in the Pines in Lakewood. From that visit, I Gordon remembers flowers, walkways, communal dining, strudel he hated, and, every night after dinner, running with his cousins to the arcade where each, for a penny, would grapple for a trinket from the sandy bottom of the Treasure Chest. Starting from this simple premise, Lish spins the whole, hilarious life of a now-disgruntled writer who, having spent his life grappling for trinkets, has achieved almost every problemsymbolic, real, or boththat he could wish to be without: bad enough being the last Lish, but how about having always been the shortest (I am the youngest. I am the smallest), always the most nervous and sensitive (Going to lengths, it was always my nature), and being faced now not only with time running out but with an injured foot thats elevated on a stool (I am Gordon sitting here . . . beset by a foot up), making nothing (especially writing) any easier. Believe me, says Gordon in another little exploding cigar of a paradox, if I made the rules, it would be a different story from start to finish. In allincluding its extraordinary collection of blank pagesa book about writing thats worthy of Laurence Sterne or Samuel Beckett and as uproarious as either. I have let my life go up in what they refer to as smoke, says I Gordon. Yet not so, as I Gordon shows by writing yet more gems like this: Words fail me. May I say something? Words fail me.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
