She is always typing, is my understanding - or was, back when I used to see her somewhat, let us just fancy, social-wise. So, fine, so the thing starts maybe all of an hour ago just a block from where I am sitting right this minute typing this up for you to read it and get out of it the same kick I did. First, as to setting - temporal, spatial, all that. My bet is you are going to be really refreshingly impressed with it, or by it, which I have to tell you is what I myself was when the woman involved in the event disclosed her heart to me. It is a celebration of loss, a poison gift from its creator dropped into the receptacle - you and I, miserable recipients of beautiful lies. It is the precisely, even obsessively, crafted product of an all-knowing narrator who dazzles with asides and distractions. Someone call the cops! Howard’s pipe is not a pipe, or not the pipe narrator Gordon thinks it is, and then it is something much more, and it is also something much less: “the pipe” is finally, literally, a few smudges of ink, or agglomerations of electrons or photons or whatever they are, on the page or screen.Ī story by Lish is anything but innocent. And in this story, right here, the situation is compounded it’s a misinterpretation of falsity, is what it is. An evocation of René Magritte’s 1928 painting “The Treachery of Images,” a picture of a pipe with “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) written beneath it, is applicable to all his output, but in particular to the story now before us, “In the District, Into the Bargain.” The picture of the thing is not the thing, if you need it spelled out, and the description of the thing is not the thing. Glaringly casual dialogue, direct references to the reader and narrator, a bit of chitchat - nothing more is here, but something much more is here.

So, in a Beckettian frame of mind, I shall embrace the excess, the uselessness of the moment and plunge right in.Ī story by Lish presents itself as deceptively open, innocently restricted to quotidian language.

But similarly, a close reading of his work suggests it is the product of someone who recognizes the superfluity of most of what we do, and in particular the superfluity of the exacting art of writing. If one regards Gordon Lish a standard bearer of the literary art, as I do, writing an introduction to his work is superfluous.

Poem innocence harold brodkey