'The Last Novel' by David Markson

Having called his “seminonfictional semifiction” a novel, Markson proceeds without plot, narrative or characterisation, piling up snippets of literary and artistic anecdote, principally of the underappreciation, decline and death of other writers and artists, as a way of addressing what he cannot bear to address: his own aging, illness and impending death. “Novelist will say more about himself only when he finds no way to evade doing so, but rarely otherwise.” The Last Novel is more pained and bitter (even self-pitying) than Markson’s previous novels of this kind, but, although “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke”, he retains his playful command of the game of fiction: the book is “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.” And we do indeed catch our breath: this deflected autobiography is a moving farewell to an unsatisfactory life, a valediction from a literary if not an actual deathbed (Markson lingered another three years after this book was published), a handbook to life’s limitations. Of what does life consist? Markson quotes a reader: “Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?”

(April 2014)