"Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke." Welcome to Greenwich Villager David Markson's life writ large, an enterprise entirely enacted within the confines of an incurably questing mind simultaneously questioning exactly what makes a novel a novel and how much paring — of exposition, description, narrative, plot, and characterisation — such a work can withstand. Markson champions The Last Novel's protagonist, grants his "Author" absolute freedom, proves the near-truism each entry must reinvent the form all over again. Or else. "Novelist's personal genre. In which part of the experiment is to continue keeping him offstage to the greatest extent possible — while compelling the attentive reader to perhaps catch his breath when things achieve an ending nonetheless."
Nevertheless, absence paradoxically reverberates with Novelist's palpable presence, almost belligerently taking up passive-aggressive residence between breathtakingly eloquent lines wherein Markson keeps precisely this notion front-and-centred scaling heady experimental heights. With the accelerated annihilation of the individual self sanctified, with the razing of art, culture, and the sacral (not to mention the efficient erasure of the subject formerly recognisable as human being in the object formerly known as book), Markson creates a parallel world echoing our planet's increasingly barbaric vapidity, the commodification of absolutely everything, and the role of spectator relentlessly thrust upon us.
Back to Square None. Roughly one percent of Markson's latest relates the protagonist's narrative directly; astonishingly, the remainder contains a searing indictment of twenty-first century dis/ease. (Putting chaos in order or order in chaos in a no-space everyplace?) Markson takes his cues from the likes of Joyce, Lowry, Faulkner, and Dizzy Dean. With The Last Novel, he delivers the finest performance of his writerly life, pulls off the next-to-impossible with élan, savoir-fairness, and bodacious kicks at the post-modern can. In strangerous other words, he recreates the work in its own conceptual image, pushing its boundaries until he arrives at that point where creator and creation merge to tell one mesmerising tale of the glorious toll time takes.
Markson found little left to love in literature around the same time pomo-palaverations superceded genre-driven pap acutely keeping its eyes on the prize. (Achebe he ain't.) Gave up on fiction back in the day when Roth, Heller, Mailer, and Vonnegut (some of whom he called friends; but, more modestly, acquaintances) owned the high-modernist movement. Seems Markson bummed with Kerouac and a bottle (or, so the trumour goes). Seems during one of his binges, he lent Jack a freshly laundered T-shirt; but, when Jack put in an appearance a full week later, he was still wearing the same item. Markson protested. Jack hit the road. Next thing he knows, Kerouac's 1969 funeral is in the works.
Moving beyond prescribed post-modern designs, a keenly personal blend of logical positivism and philosophically poetic consonance definitively illustrates Markson takes a page from the only book Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. Weary and suspicious of the novel as an entity unto itself, the author knocks the stuffing out of it altogether, preferring to present uniquely original sets of innovations by inventing approaches to speaking the unspeakable in brave new ways. (Above all else, Wittgenstein passionately conceived of a philosophy situated within its proper literary context, a hyper-poetic motherlode mode.)
Bricolage? Florilegium? A little wild bouquet of vignettes, aperçus, facts, baseball stats, inset poetic scraps, quotes, anecdotes, and interior-dialogue reminiscences, all synchromeshing to beat the bland shape most novels now assume (working for the green machine)? The Last Novel finds its hapless hero in a blue funk, writing against a deadline, literally, compressing detail and dust, desire and lust, till all shimmer indistinguishably in one unified atomistic glow.
An impeccably spare stream-of-consciousness complements the pithy, axiomatic, and epigrammatic three-four sentence paragraph structural organisation Markson effortlessly perfects. The craftsman at the heart of The Last Nov el describes his work as "literally crammed with literary and artistic anecdotes" and "nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage." Think friction. Think fracture. Then, think The Waste Land's concentrated chaos of despair. Its shaded tonalities and compelling shifts of view provide the scaffolding for much of what Novelist chooses to bring to life in the footlights of the magnificent loneliness of twilight existence:
"Novelist's isolation — ever increasing as the years pass also . . . Days on which he is aware of speaking to no one at all, for example, except perhaps a checkout clerk, or his letter carrier, or some basically anonymous fellow tenant in the elevator."
The self-protective author's been called a cult genius, a man-in-a-million, a right royal iconoclastic rebel without applause. Until earlier this year, that is. Why? He finally earned the long-overdue American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for "outstanding achievement in literature." Next thing he knows? New York magazine bestows a rather dubious distinction upon the octogenarianish hard-scrabbling povert. He finds the gesture "amusing and gratifying": "Sixty-one critics and each one of them picks a different book and I have two critics who pick a different one of my books," he confided to Publishers Weekly. Each critic chose a different novel. Of the seven he's shared with the world, did either critic consider, say, Wittgenstein's
Or, perhaps, 1977's Springer's Progress, Reader's Block (1996), or This Is Not a Novel (2001)? All qualify; but, nope. The pair of winners? Vanishing Point (2004) and The Last Novel, just released, immediately accepted by Shoemaker & Hoard (whereas Wittgenstein's Mistress was rejected 54 times before the Dalkey Archive scooped up a masterpiece many considered much too "experimental," "difficult," "erudite" or, probably most tragically disheartening, "not a novel at all").
No matter. The near-inexpressible first fact of this brief contra-autobiography's brilliance, extending limits and recharting boundaries of our shared language "a little further against the dark," renders it as gorgeous as a great poem (and as intricately written). Each word carries its weight on the slow-dawning stage Novelist sets, most keenly in the work's opening pages, but one of its maestro strokes for the benefit of Reader. In its intricately intertwingling way, it is a trybrid long-poem, one-third riveting novella, one-third trifurcating descant-variant, one-third eulogistic jeremiad, wholly integrated pièce de résistance.
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A poetry fellow of the Chalmers' Arts Foundation, award-winning writer Judith Fitzgerald's O, Clytaemnestra, the concluding volume in her critically acclaimed epic poem, THE ADAGIOS QUARTET, will be launched 4 November at Windsor's BookFest. She is currently completing "Leonard Cohen: Master of Song" (authorised by its subject who contributes eight original works of art to the Spring 2008 book). Visit http://www.judithfitzgerald.ca/ .
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