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)
Reader has the intention of writing a novel but cannot disentangle the
protagonist from himself (or from the author, for that matter). Having “no life”
to speak of, what results is a curiously structured outpouring of cultural
detritus: snippets of literary anecdote or quotation, curious fragments of
biography, unusual names, scholarly relics and little-known details cataloguing
the misfortunes and travails of the artistic life: madness, illness, poverty,
failure, neglect, affront, suicide, frailty, decline, calamity and death.
Eventually we sense that this often very funny collage of ruin is Reader's
deflected autobiography: unable to face his own impending mortality he looks
away always at the last moment yet locates the unspeakable precisely by avoiding
it. This book is both formally experimental and very moving.
(July 2013)
