SOURCE: "Bygone Haircuts and Other Stories," in The New York Times Book Review, April 3, 1988, p. 11.

In the following negative review of Mourner at the Door, Rubins maintains that Lish's short fiction is "so mannered, so derivatively styled, as to cancel out all intimacy and empathy. "

From Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield, "Call me Ishmael" to "So it goes," the calling up of home-grown voices, narrators who address us in the unbuttoned vernacular with conversational immediacy, has been one of the impudent glories of American fiction. Backwoodsy or ethnic, laconic or rambling, the most commanding of these straight talkers take a shortcut into the reader's imagination. We seem to be getting the story firsthand, unvarnished and unpackaged, instead of through a literary sieve—especially when the narrator is also at the center of the action.

Gordon Lish's first novel, Dear Mr. Capote, which was cast in the form of...