Peru by Gordon Lish

 


Give me a novel of obsession. "I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man."

Peru by Gordon Lish is a novel of obsession, a novel where an American middle-aged underground man spins his internal dialogue with a vengeance, an intense gush, a sorcerer's hex.

One big reason Peru makes for a unique, unforgettable read: Gordon Lish's narrator can enter the mind and body of his six-year-old self - a six year old's feelings, confusions, fears, ambitions, a six year old's wish for power and control, a six year old's vivid, immediate sense of shimmering aliveness.

Gordon Lish frames his tale thusly: While packing up his son for camp, the fifty-year-old narrator watches a snatch of extreme violence on the late night news: two men repeatedly stab each other as they're both machine-gunned down by police - location: a prison roof in Peru (thus the novel's title). The following morning, in his haste to get his son off on a bus, a taxi's trunk lid accidentally comes down on the poor guy's head.

Eyeballing the prison hyperviolence (only visual since the narrator and his wife had the sound turned down so as not to wake up their son) combined with that crack on his head trigger the narrator's memory - he flashes back forty-four years to the time when he, Gordon, was a six-year-old boy.

Gordon merges with his six-year-old self and quickly relates what's critically important: playing in Andy Lieblich's sandbox (his family lived next door to the Lieblichs), memories of Andy, Andy's nanny, a colored man (author's language) employed by the Lieblichs, his first-grade teacher Miss Donnelly and, last but hardly least, the fact he, Gordon, killed a boy his age, Stephen Adinoff, whacked him on the head with a toy hoe in Andy Lieblich's sandbox.

Quick shift to key themes and highlights:

MEMORY
As a symphony orchestra circles back, repeating musical phrases at a faster and faster tempo, so too Gordon circles back to the people and events surrounding his time in the sandbox, a constant acceleration, picking up more detail with each pass, a further elaboration of what he hears, feels and smells, his wishes and desires, so that toward the end of the novel, Gordon's memory spins in a frantic swirl.

LANGUAGE
In his essay, A Sentence is a Lonely Place, Gary Lutz makes a profound observation about language: "Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround." This is key when reading Peru. To get the full impact, the magical buzz of what it means to be Gordon the six year old, open yourself up completely, submit to the rhythm and repetition of his words, even read sections of the novel aloud.

OPENING OF THE HEART
Gordon Lish on writing: "You're safest when you're at your most honest - which I would be quick to justify my own scribbling as being. In my writing, I'm psychopathically engaged with the phonemic; the smallest spicule of the construct is a concern to me. At the same time, I try to give way to a speech which has its origin somewhere well beyond my understanding. It is as if something interior is determined to speak." And Gordon told another interviewer: "I'm trying to recover the language as it occurs in my heart, in my ear."

I include the above quotes to underscore why Peru packs such a wallop: to repeat, Gordon Lish connects directly with the heart and mind of a six year old. It's no accident that many readers of the novel have reported Peru awakens their own memories of what it was like to be a kid that age.

FACT OR FICTION
Did Gordon actually kill Steven Adinoff? Or, is this a story made up by Gordon the six-year-old kid and/or Gordon the fifty-year-old man? The answer might not be clear cut for even Gordon himself since memory can slip, slither, skid and slide. Recall Jorge Luis Borges recounting how when we recall a past memory the first time we have the image of the past before us but when we recall subsequent times, we are recalling a memory of a memory. Imagine Gordon recounting episodes in the sandbox hundreds or even thousands of times over the years. And since we're storytelling animals at heart, when do the facts, so called, stop and our stories, our fictions begin? Seen in this way, Peru can be seen as a meditation on the nature of memory and identity.

POWER PLAY
Gordon confesses, "We just had the strength of children. We were not strong - believe you me, we really weren't. As boys in general go, or as they went in those particular times, or in that town at that particular time, that is, in the town of Woodmere, we were not what you would have called the sturdy kind of boy or the rough-and-ready kind of boy, the boy who is by nature husky in the body and hardy in the habits. You did not get muscles from the kinds of things which boys like us did, or just have them from the type of bodies which we were born with to begin with. We ourselves were not boys like that."

How would Gordon go about compensating for what he judges a lack of strength? What if he, Gordon, could kill, kill a kid he judged inferior since he spoke with a speech impediment? Recall Raskolnikov, recall Alex and his Droogs - violence and hyperviolence as the ultimate power play, made all the more powerful when linked with obsession.

All told, Peru makes for one hell of a powerful, penetrating novel.


Gordon Lish, born 1934