This is Not a Review

Abstract

This is Not a Review Steven Moore (bio) This is Not a Novel and Other Novels David Markson Counterpoint Press www.counterpointpress.com 441 Pages; Print, $19.95 After warming up with three commercial novels, the late David Markson (1926–2010) published seven ultra-literary ones between 1966 and 2007. At a glance, the first three look totally different from each other, while the last three—now available in a handsome omnibus edition—look totally alike. The fourth, the paradigm-shifting Reader’s Block (1996), set the pattern for the last three, but can also be seen as the culmination of a propensity that runs through all the earlier ones, including the commercial warm-ups. From early on, Markson loved novels thick with literary allusions and intellectual references, specifically Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), and Gaddis’s Recognitions (1955). As he progressed in his career, each new novel became thicker with allusions and references, and seemed to reach a saturation point in Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), whose thin raft of a plot supports a heavy cargo of references to all of Western culture. Markson finished writing that one in 1984, spent the next three years trying to find a publisher, then spent the next seven years contriving a way to write “A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel,” as the narrator of Reader’s Block states on page 61. That novel dramatizes the author’s ruminations on how much traditional novelistic matter he should use in his next novel: plot, setting, character background, autobiographical details he might use, and so on, the types of things a typical novelist would think about during the planning stages. (“Author” here refers to both Markson and his novel-writing stand-in, whom he calls Reader.) He expresses some reluctance to bother with such stuff: “Valéry said he could never write a novel for one insurmountable reason. He would have to include sentences like ‘The Marquise went out at five.’” Reader is more interested in trivia about artists like that, which begin popping up on the very first page. Those factoids, and the patterns they create (anti-Semitism, insulting reviews, artistic eccentricities, and especially the deaths of artists), prove more interesting to the author than the mundane matters of plot and characterization. Blocked from writing a typical novel, “his mind full of clutter,” Reader compiles this atypical one instead, retaining the notes and queries to himself and all the factoids but dispensing with the traditional novel outerwear. There’s page-turning momentum and a skeletal narrative arc—“I have a narrative. But you will be put to it to find it,” he taunts—but without the novelistic padding and connective tissue. Markson’s paragraphs had been growing shorter ever since Going Down (1970); here they are printed in discrete units with spaces in between so that the pages resemble X-rays where the novelistic innards are whited out. Given Markson’s idolatry of Ulysses, the style could be described as stream of consciousness without the water, just hundreds of river stones. Though Markson didn’t intend to write a sequel, much less to compose what some critics now call a Notecard Quartet, he liked the form of Reader’s Block enough, and was pleased enough at its favorable reception to write another one. Alienated by the publisher of Reader’s Block, Markson submitted his next novel to Counterpoint, which not only published his subsequent novels but reissued some of his earlier ones. This Is Not a Novel appeared in 2001, followed by Vanishing Point in 2004 and the prophetically named The Last Novel in 2007. Though there are slight shifts in emphasis in each one, even less novelistic matter, and slightly different characterizations of their narrators (all of whom are 98% Markson himself), all four novels explore a common theme. It can be found in a book cited in Reader’s Block, Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)—specifically, the Penguin version called Essays and Aphorisms. (That’s where Markson found the misogynistic statement about women on page 138 of Reader’s Block.) On pages 210...