MY ROMANCE

By Gordon Lish.

Norton, $18.95.

Filled with memory, guilt and bodily and other obsessions, and presented in the lapel-grabbing style of a contemporary Ancient Mariner, "My Romance" inhabits familiar Gordon Lish territory. Originally staged as an impromptu monologue at a writers' conference, the author's fourth novel tells the story of the narrator, Gordon Lish, and his implication in his father's death several years earlier. Just what Mr. Lish did to expedite the ailing man's demise is the whirlpool into which this tale descends with increasing urgency, catching other memories -- of childhood, a sister who died, a torturous case of psoriasis -- in its course. Some of the segues between recollections are swift and elegant, forming (especially toward the end) a strange dance whose rhythm, though hard to follow, is intriguing nonetheless. But although there are some vivid images here, they never really inform one another, never gather collective significance in the way we expect a novel -- even one based on a juxtaposition of images rather than a conventional story line -- to do. They remain discrete "jokes" in a stand-up routine, except that the essential reference point -- the performer in the act of performing -- is gone. In transposing a live presentation onto the printed page, Mr. Lish ultimately poses an insoluble problem: how are we to "read" a text that isn't really a text and for which we are not really the audience? For all the novel's seeming desire to be heard, we come away feeling that "My Romance" doesn't really need us. Make no mistake about it: this is a one-man show.