SOURCE: "Writing the Troubling Truth," in Commonweal, Vol. CXIV, No. 15, September 11, 1987, pp. 501-04.

In the essay below, Jones discusses the defining characteristics of Lish's fiction.

The public fascination with the mess F. Scott Fitzgerald made of his life encouraged the confusion in popular culture that sees serious writers as something like movie stars who can type. What is significant about Fitzgerald's peculiar fame is that even when he was alive, he was more famous than his novels. His and Zelda's escapades were known to people who did not ordinarily read, and his years in Hollywood and the excesses that felled him made him seem no different from any other actor on a downhill binge. And despite his torture in his last years at being unable to write and shame at having been reduced to a studio hack, he came to personify a kind of glamour that the public...