White Plains review: editor Gordon Lish follows his musings

"How does a chap talk anymore? How, on Earth, does one speak?" There is no question more central to White Plains, a new collection of "pieces and witherlings" by Gordon Lish. Lish is probably better known as an editor than an author in his own right, having used his time as an editor at Esquire magazine in the 1970s (and later at Knopf) to champion the work of some of American fiction's most revered names – Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Joy Williams among them. His own work has consistently found itself in the places where traditional writerly coherence is shot all to hell.

The texts in White Plains aren't quite stories. In several cases it wouldn't be accurate to even call them fictions. Every "I", it is made clear, is "Gordon". Whatever the texts are, they're concerned most of all with themselves, with the words as they pile out on to the page. Like many an aging modernist – Beckett is perhaps the telling instance – the materials of expression are constantly questioned. Why this word over that one? Why anything at all? The quote at the beginning of this review is followed by: "Unless it's any more. It's a minefield, n'est-ce pas?" Each space, each hyphen, each italicisation and capitalisation counts. This is contested ground.

Naugahyde is constructed almost entirely of dialogue between a man and a women, conducted over the telephone. He said, she said. They interrupt each other, correct each other, dispute each other's memories. It appears they had an affair at some stage, perhaps long ago. They come close to saying what, as a reader, you feel is there to be said, but they never come right out with it. It's left to another voice, the writer's voice, to spell it out in a final paragraph.

Blackmail of speech

This switch from the hesitant, pocked, unreliable spoken word to the elegant, measured and emotionally accurate written word is an important moment. It highlights what Lish calls, in another piece here, the “blackmail” of rehearsed speech. “What is culture but the revenge of the spoken,” he writes, “what is language but its vehicle for conceiving inconceivable trickeries?” Often, if not always, this is what writing is: a scam. (“Not art, no – not that, positively not!”) Lish is a card sharp on a boardwalk, catching your ear. It’s a hoax, a sham, but it’s fun sometimes to be deceived. It’s better to just go along with it.

It's fun too to peek behind the curtain. White Plains offers the reader glimpses of an old man's life: his apartment, mostly unchanged since the death of his wife more than 20 years ago; his work, never straightforward or undramatic; his family and his friends. The longest piece here, Begging the Question, comically details the struggles of the aged Lish to deal with his neighbours and their communal recycling area.

Many of the most memorable sections detail the death of Lish’s wife, Barbara, or the growth of their children. At one point he says his son’s first novel is a work of genius. It’s ridiculous – who has the right? – but it’s totally sincere. So are his criticisms: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize is a sign of the degenerate times, while popular, prolific writers such as Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates get their own lashes of Lish’s tongue – perfectly fair, perfectly cruel.

Lish's words remain sharp in the encroaching darkness of old age. They really draw blood when he uses them on – or should that be against? – himself. In Postcards, Lish gets totally wound up over not hearing from Campbell Geeslin, an old friend he has met in person only once. They've been sending each other postcards, every two weeks or so, for more than 20 years. There's a lot of meditation in the piece about friendship and companionship, about duty and responsibility, and courage. Lish's own failures in all these areas are laid bare.

When Geeslin’s expected missive does not arrive, Lish begins to worry that his friend has died. He becomes frantic, wondering whether a conversation on the phone would break the text-based bond between the two men. It’s funny, but also deeply tragic, this terrible hesitation. When Geeslin does what Lish cannot and picks up the phone, Lish’s relief is overwhelming. It turns quickly to self-criticism, and then redoubled commitment to the only thing he knows. “Performance, irreality, selfing the selfhood – right up to the very end,” he writes. “It’s not double-dealing. It’s honest. It’s all Gordon, all. I mean, what other cards have there ever been for me to play?”