KRUPP’S LULU

After such great Lish novels as Epigraph (1996) and Arcade, or How to Write a Novel (1998), a volume of mere stories can seem slight stuff; but moments here, even so, place Lish among the top few still writing what once was called `serious` literature.

The tiny `Facts of Steel` sets out a poetics, announcing that `Nothing would please me more than for me as an artist to be free to sit here and tell you the truth. But they won't let me do it.` Who `they` is may puzzle some while confirming for others that in mass-culture `truth` is increasingly a taboo—which is why, says Lish, `I have no choice but to resort to ruse after ruse. God knows I get no pleasure from it . . . . But am I the one who has the say?` And the `ruses` here when brilliant are brilliant indeed, though when meager, meager with a vengeance. `Ground` recollects childhood in a way so tedious (a boy pretends his two fingers are a walking man) that it refuses to be interesting, except possibly for the author (and not even that for sure); the same goes, say, for the overreaching of `The Positions,` a teeny tale whose speaker claims that `the best thing in my life` has been pulling lint from under the clothes dryer. On the other hand, the simple buying of a new window shade, in `Physis versus Nomos,` captivates with sheer smartness and drollery, while `Man on the Go,` about a widower and a misbehaving washing machine, gets a perfect ten for laugh-out-loud funny. The travel-tale `Among the Pomeranians` may be slow, but so what when `How the Sophist Got Spotted,` for example, is a true Beckettian tour de force, or when `Mercantilism` wraps up whole lives and entire eras in a brilliance of wit, woe, and words.

Lish, with his ups and downs, is still our Joyce, our Beckett, our most true modernist. Buy! Read! Listen up!