My daystar.”) But page-by-page, Lisicky’s style relies less on extravagant language than on extravagant techne: a maximal use of complexity. (One highlight: an amazing passage after he breaks up with M., “My furnace. He crafts prose like someone who workshops crafted prose for a living, which means he’s elegant, precise, and sensitive. who’s held a number of tony fellowships and residencies (along the way collecting shimmery insider friendships for Gess to envy), has passed through America’s official creative writing gullet. Denise grows frailer and M finds a new lover meanwhile, Lisicky displaces his feelings about life’s precariousness onto a televised demolition, the house coming down “as a person would, balancing there for a minute, stricken.”

Helens, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, explosions, and Sept. Like a Discovery Channel show narrated by Supreme Leader Snoke, he relives the Deepwater Horizon oil leak, the eruption of Mount St. (Glass-ian images of trapdoors and riffs on Holden Caulfield’s frozen pond appear throughout.) In this sentence, from Franny and Zooey, a character recalls: “Seymour once said to me-in a crosstown bus, of all places-that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.” Lisicky reflects that dissolving such lines-or thinking about dissolving them as your bus route collapses the border between the east side and the west side-is “good,” and that’s how he writes: by letting his emotions spill into the natural world, into involved and sensual descriptions of environmental catastrophe. Salinger, who along with Whitman forms part of the text’s imaginative infrastructure. Lisicky activates this theme, early on, with a quote from J.D. The Narrow Door is a work of bleeding boundaries.

A narrow door book review