Mourner at the Door

by Gordon Lish

A collection of stories captures the significance of the trivial details and everyday experiences that often add up to create the majority of an individual's memory

Genres: Short Stories, Literature, American, Fiction

219 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 1988

About the author

Gordon Jay Lish is an American writer. As a literary editor, he championed many American authors, particularly Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and Richard Ford.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Gordon List, dubbed Captain Fiction by his fiction writing students back in the 70s, 80s & 90s when he exerted a tremendous influence on Harold Brodkey, Cynthia Ozick, Don DeLillo, Gary Lutz, M. Sarki, Ben Marcus and many others recognizable names on the contemporary literary scene.

And Gordon wrote his own fiction, novels such as Peru and Dear Mr. Capote in addition to hundreds of short stories collected in books like Mourner at the Door featuring twenty-seven short Gordon poppers.

Gordon has a highly distinctive writer's voice. All anyone has to do is read the first few lines of a Captain Fiction snapper to recognize it is the one and only Gordon.

A reader unfamiliar with Gordon's work might ask: How is this possible?

Gordon himself provides the first key to this question when he speaks in general terms about what he's after when he sits down at his desk, as per -

LANGUAGE OF THE HEART
"I'm trying to recover the language as it occurs in my heart, in my ear." Gordon goes on to say there's a primal, innate language in all of us that's integral to our biology and it's this language he seeks to retrieve and put down on paper - and, in this way, his novels and short stories provide a written record of his very being.

GRAB THE READER
"I want to grab the reader and force their face down on the page." Gordon seeks a narrative voice that's both familiar and totally unique, a voice that's compelling, enthralling, riveting, a voice that can move and shock a reader and, when needed, a voice that can be erotic. Gordon acknowledges his writing requires concentration and certainly doesn't make for a quick read. Gordon hones and retools his writing via multiple rewrites until he reaches a point where every single word counts.

REPETITION AND CLICHÉS
"We think in clichés; we speak in clichés, we tend to be the product of our culture's clichés." Gordon is fascinated by the phenomenon of clichés along with the repetition of language. He observes there's a calming, a soothing, a kind of magic and shamanistic effect when we use clichés and repeat words - cliché and repetition as incantation, language as a vehicle of power.

ENSHROUD THE READER
"I want to enshroud a reader in the ambience of my voice. I want a reader to feel enclosed within an atmosphere that promotes a certain gaze, a buzzy feeling enabling the reader to drift along in the story's language. My writing is all about the WAY the story is told rather than the story itself." Tell it like it is, Gordon! To get a clearer sense for what the Captain is driving at here, I've included the actual first words of a trio of Gordon's stories below. Incidentally, Gordon calls a story's beginning 'the attack'.

MORE SENSATIONS
Thanks to the internet and other media, we're all drowning in information. According to Gordon, what we need in fiction isn't more information but greater sensations and deeper feelings. This is exactly what Gordon aims to put before the reader: the possibility of dreams; the possibility of feelings, a way for us to connect with life in all its mystery.

NOT A STORY
Gordon insists his tales are unlike a conventional story happening out there in the world; rather, his fictions occur in the moment, in one place. So true. With a Gordon Lish story, I have the distinct impression the narrator is sitting alone in a room, speaking, ranting, browbeating or spinning. A Lish narrator spinning reminds me of the narrator in a Stephen Dixon story, however, with Dixon, the action usually takes place out in the world - on the subway, walking the street, in a bookstore, in a restaurant, in an apartment or office. But with Gordon, as much as the narrator spins, the spinning is all in the head, making for intense storytelling.

FIRST SENTENCE
Ah, the first sentence. Here's the prime zip, zap, zup when approaching any of Gordon's zingers. As the Captain says: "My first sentence is "the story" and everything thereafter is a kind of dilation of that first sentence, expanding and evolving that first sentence until it becomes a global event."

The second key is reading and rereading Gordon's fiction for yourself. Fanfare with bugles and tubas - three Gordon attacks:

THE DEATH OF ME
I wanted to be amazing. I wanted to be so amazing. I had already been amazing up to a certain point. But I was tired of being at that point. I wanted to go past that point. I wanted to be more amazing than I had been up to that point. I wanted to do something which went beyond that point and which went beyond every other point and which people would look at and say that this was something which went beyond all other points and which no other boy would ever be able to go beyond, that I was the only boy who could, that I was the only one.

SHIT
I like talking about people sitting on toilets. It shows up in the bulk of my speech. Wherever at all in keeping with things. I try to work it in. You just have to look back at stories I have had printed to see that I am telling the truth. People on toilets is certain to show up with more than passing incidence. I will even go so far as to say that where you find a story with a person on a toilet in it, forget the name that's signed as author - no one but me could have written the thing. Indeed, it is inconceivable to me that I didn't.

THE LESSON WHICH IS SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY THEREOF
Have I not been insisting it is the most instructive of stories? In fact, it is the most instructive of stories. Indeed, the great thing will be to see if I can uncover the core of the instruction that is prospectively in it. I mean, in the telling, maximize the teaching - do it, and keep on doing it, from the beginning to the end.
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There you are at your writing desk. You want to be a writer? Take a tip from the Captain - "do it, and keep on doing it, from the beginning to the end."

[Bob Wake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gordon Lish’s métier is the monologue, both as teacher and writer. He was influenced by the legendary Beat Generation jabberer Neal Cassady, as was Kerouac. Lish, however, is a minimalist on the page. A rigorous condenser. (His writing workshops, on the other hand, are notorious for his marathon seven-hour lectures.) Most all of the 27 stories in Mourner at the Door are emphatically first-person narratives. The few that aren’t rely nonetheless on keenly self-aware third-person narration. As such, this 1988 collection is a masterclass on voice. The stories, often experimental and stripped of context, are pitiless, cruel, and unexpectedly funny and/or violent.

[Brent Legault · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of beautiful mutants that would not live long in the wild but, tamed between two covers, would make a nice addition to any literary zoo.

[Clark · Rating 2 out of 5]

I still had a couple of stories to finish in this but my roommate's dog tore it apart before I got around to it. I didn't really care either way. Though from both Lish and the dog I expected better.

[Roz · Rating 2 out of 5]

A series of stories from Gordon Lish, perhaps best remembered now as fiction editor of Esquire back in the day. They’re experimental in a formal way - one is a list of place names, another a monologue, a third a profanity laced shout at the reader. They are interesting in this sense: they’re playful with the form and structure of short stories, but they’re also a little too stiff, a little too dry. By contrast, Barthelme was able to play with the form too, but his stories seemed to have more heart to them - not the vaguely misanthropic vibe that many of Lish’s stories have. Too much time in New York City, I dunno.

Originally published in all kinds of literary quarterlies, and collected as a book in 1988, the stuff here has slipped through the cracks. And probably not without reason. It’s not a bad collection, but honestly it didn’t really do it for me. It just like Lish was trying to pop a wheelie one too many times.

[Anna Ward-Gow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its titular story has stars allll the way to the moon.

The rest were good and interesting.

[Stephen · Rating 1 out of 5]

The ‘All style no substance’ of Zimzum but executed a whole lot worse. Reading Gordon lish is the equivalent to this:

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

Holy, holy, holy lord. This was flat-out horrible. I'll read some of Lish's other, earlier work before making too harsh a judgement against him as a writer overall (though as a Carver fan I'll admit to a bias), but this collection was laughably bad. At its most concrete (meaning its least abstract or metaphorical (I'm assuming the story about a married couple whose primary activity together is frequent vomiting is a metaphor for . . . something)) these stories resemble the silly childishness of James Franco or Miranda July. Sentences double back on themselves, repeating words or phrases for, I suppose, the sake of humor or some sort of aggregate aesthetic effect, though the actual effect is sheer exhaustion. Not a single sentence here impresses, which spells death for a book like this. It's like reading Leonard Michaels if Leonard Michaels were maybe fifteen and hadn't a clue how to write. Stories like these are why postmodernism, experimentalism, poststructuralism, are looked down upon by other (realist) writers/critics. Barthelme wrote incredible sentences, so it didn't matter what form his stories took. Lish's sentences are atrocious, thus the playfulness of the language and the forms here reveal themselves to be nothing more than sad tools (attempting) to mask the weak language. The misuse of "which" (versus "that" and, for that matter, "who") is so consistent and frequent you have to assume it's intentional (but then, why?). In the final story's final lines, Lish seems to take a potshot at the reader, which, always a great idea for an author to insult his reader, as if Lish has/had them in spades. Maybe he did. Whatever. This book was horrid. One of the stories, appropriately titled "Shit," is about a guy who sits on the toilet and tries hard to make himself shit so that his mother can look at his shit and then send him off to play. Which, sure, might have been hilarious. In the hands of a writer.

[Robb Todd]

Some good stories, some not so good -- he would tell you that himself if you asked. Gordon Lish's legacy is as an editor and teacher, although I think his writing will not get due credit until long after he's dead. Whatever. If you read this book, read the stories aloud. They are better that way.

[Erik · Rating 1 out of 5]

one of the worst books i've read in a long time. don't bother with this one.