In Search of Celebrity

...His carefully wrought speech breaks down and signals a swift end when the final pressure comes-after he has told us about the straitjackets (they are not soft except for the laces), the victim whose death revolted him ("the mush, the brain, the whole business"), the attempted seduction by Janet R's mother, the discovery of Paki-his knife-on the copying machine at work Unfortunately, the novel wears the scent of a private joke Yours Truly's constant jibes at Mailer and nasty familiarity with Capote approach the exploitive The novel, though brilliantly crafted, its form and texture bound into Yours Truly's resolute march to madness, leads nowhere...

...Cynthia Ozick has suggested that from "stories and novels that mean to be literature, one expects a certain corona of moral purpose not outright in the grain of the fiction itself, but in the form of a faintly incandescent envelope around it " The best stories "touch on the redemptive," that is, "the sense that we act for ourselves rather than are acted upon above all, that we can surprise ourselves " Lish's book plays mercilessly, albeit with great style, with psychological determinism, leaving no room for redemptive surprises...

...Don't kid yourself," and (the most revealing in its aggressive self-mockery) "Listen, do me a favor and don't make me laugh " Yet out of the useless phrases he parrots from his wife, his mother and the radio he manages to wring a stark eloquence . The characters he creates duplicate each other They replace those he has lost (in addition to supporting his incessant lies) Davie, the imaginary brother, takes the blame for Yours Truly's partly accidental murder of Buddy Brown, the little boy next door who was praised once too often by Yours Truly's mother Ben Berme, a radio personality, becomes at once his alter-ego, his father and his prepubescent childhood girlfriend Janet Rose, all of whom made it "easy and sleepy and nice " His "ball and chain," his wife, has the initials T C , just like the man in whose hands Yours Truly is placing his son's welfare...

...Capote By Gordon Lish Holt, Rinehart, Winston 258 pp $15 95 Reviewed by Emily Benedek "This is the 12th start of the letter I am writing Here is the reason it's the 12th start The reason is to in out voices' I want the right one "So begins Gordon Lish's Dear Mi Capote, a first novel where the narrator's letters disclose the extraordinary breakdown of an ordinary man "Dear Mr C he continues, "'You know who this is' Answer This is the person who can make a certain writer millions1 All he has to do is play his cards right, which 1 do not have to tell you is not what a certain Mr Norman Mailer did Dear Mr Capote, With sour permission, I will go ahead and introduce myself Hint 1 am the one who is killing the people Correction just the ones which when Nature calls sit down to you-know-what ". Yours Truly's plan is to murder a woman for every one of his 47 years, then turn himself in As he writes, 23 victims have already succumbed to his unusual technique He hopes that Truman Capote will share the profits from a book about these exploits with Yours Truly's son The narrator is determined that the boy, a narcissistic extension of himself, get a better hand than he was dealt...

...It's like you get so proud you tremble " He finds himself inside Simon's hardware store He keeps looking for her, looking up where adults are to a little boy Then he looks down and sees the glass case full of knives "Only over my dead body," he later reflects, "will the boy ever see a thing like that ". He dotes on his boy Television shows are monitored, the first thing the boy sees when he wakes up is his Word-a-Day calendar (from which, as we will learn, Yours Truly finds tools for his crimes), and at the movies when the action gets a bit off-color, Yours Truly covers the boy's ears "and he himself covers his eyes " The son is nine years old and always has his walkie-talkie with him (he will not have to wonder about where the voices in his pocket come from) " 'You copy, Red Dog...

...I will tell you how to think of me," commands the man whose compulsions lead him to shroud the contingency of his inner world with a false order "Think about me as an inventor who is selling his invention Don't think of me as a Bundy or a Berkowitz I am nine million miles from individuals of that type ' A faithful husband, he tells us, he works in a top-ten bank where he has occupied the same position (in payroll) for 17 years We learn that his father lost a job as a liquor salesman, moved his family to a poorer neighborhood and disappeared...

...Listen, I guarantee you, a certain person is never going to have to worry about not knowing how long a minute is ". Lish's Yours Truly is ingenuous, repulsive, lonely, capable of compelling imaginative flights His letters flow from accounts of crucial events to non sequiturs, from philosophical comment to news The tempo increases as he works himself into the core of his story and afterward disintegrates rapidly, forced to acknowledge the facts of his life He explains why he sits down to urinate (it is quieter), he tells us that he misses the boy when he's at school or asleep, we learn about his ritual connubial duties and his sudden vertigo...

...No one ever told me This is something I had to find out ". After the father's departure, Yours Truly's mother began "going to business," a term he failed to understand, even worse was her " I' 11 be just a minute " One of the book's most ominous scenes depicts Yours Truly in the family Plymouth waiting for her, for the minute to end He wants to lock all the doors, he on the floor and think out that minute, but that would infuriate his mother "So I get sweaty, I can't remember Meaning, did she or didn't she give me a hint...

...This is Blue Dog, over and out ' " Can you guess who was on the other end of the seven watter...

...The symbols that help his world cohere are the eye and the word the eye that cannot see, the camera eye that catches you, and words that reveal, or have no meaning His language is a cacophany of cliches that allows him to avoid the truth "The thing of it is,""You see what I am saying...

...His mother, the seldom present but central force in the book, was a cashier '' She worked in a store She took in the money and made change I mean, if you wanted to find her, you went to the cash register, and this is what she looked like-she looked like a person you didn't look at " She left him in the dark about things, exactly what he will never do as a parent When he asked her whether the dust specks he saw in sunbeams were in fact little animals, she laughed at him "I did not know they were dust, okay...

...And then what...

...This time he cannot wait out the fraught interval any longer, he opens the door and runs into the first store he comes upon "I know it's crazy, but I am more sweaty about her catching me than I am about waiting in the car " He has accomplished a first "I mean, you do something you didn't think you could, okay...