Arcade or How to Write a Novel

The transcendent quirkiness of Lish's style--repetitive, meandering, self-referential--brings 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 people--like 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.)