Subject: Re: Fritz Pitz: The Glass Family Janitor
oconnort@nyu.edu
Date: Wed Apr 23 1997 - 12:00:38 GMT
Other entertaining Salingerisms are in Gordon Lish's first collection of
short stories, What I Know So Far.
One is a story ostensibly written by Buddy Glass about Zooey Glass and
Zooey's son ("For Rupert -- With No Promises"), and is brilliant. When
it ran in Esquire (Feb. 1977) originally, many people speculated that
JDS himself had written it. Esquire ran it and said they didn't know
who the writer was. Lish, it turns out, was the author, and was not
coincidentally the fiction editor of the magazine.
The other story ("For Jerome -- With Love and Kisses") is in the voice
of JDS's father, who lives in a Florida condominium tower with the
parents of many modern American writers. The parents of the more
successful writers (Philip Roth's, for instance) get the better
apartments. The parents of less successful writers get lesser
benefits. The father harangues his son (who, we come to understand,
is JDS) about how he can't even get his son's phone number from New
Hampshire telephone information. And he wonders why a son with a
perfectly good name like Jerome has to go by initials, as if he
doesn't even have a real name. It's a lot of fun.
Both stories are enjoyable. Lish has another book scheduled for this
year that sounds tantalizing:
Self-imitation of myself : fictions false and falser :
stories : New York : Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997
It's not out yet, from all I can determine, and I don't know anything
about what it will contain.
--tim o'connor
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