Gordon Lish Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Brian Evenson

Critical Essay by Brian Evenson

SOURCE: A review of Zimzum, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XIII, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 214-15.

Below, Evenson offers a stylistic analysis of Zimzum.

Lish is not afraid to violate taboo, to render discourse extravagant, to speak of that which others dare not, in his relentless exploration of the abscession of the human heart. A consummate stylist, Lish offers up sentences near perfect in their rhythmical and tonal qualities. Zimzum advances through sentential variation and permutation, employing the formal repetition common to musical arrangement, to liberate the powers of the utterance. The result is a brilliant, dark, comic novella, a book unique in American literature.

Zimzum consists of six discrete sections, from two to fifty-five pages. The first four sections practice a non-paragraphing whose seamlessness rivals Márquez's Autumn of the Patriarch and Bernhard's Correction. The sections are linked by a common theme: people are little more than...
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