Spike Magazine

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self-imprisonment in genre. Real fiction is a form of
exploring oneself and the world, perhaps finding oneself
and the world, perhaps finding a passage through
darkness (forgive the Romantic clichés). Maybe Muriel
should try it sometime. She might even win the Booker
Prize. Or maybe she should stick with horror. In recent
years, the Booker has tried to appeal to a wider audience
and so last year the shortlist was made up entirely
of genre fiction. Or was it the year before? Who cares?
David Markson’s novels will never be soiled by the
attentions of the Booker Prize committee. He would be
eliminated early on because of his reputation as an innovator.
Anyway, as an American, he is ineligible. His
earlier novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress is about the last
person on Earth, although this is not apparent to the
innocent reader. It consists of short paragraphs of statements
and self-questioning by a lone woman. Actually,
I haven’t read it, or any other of his novels. In fact, I’ve
never seen any of them in a shop or a library. But I have
now read This Is Not A Novel. It is a 190-page bricolage
of quotations, anecdotes and opinions on artists, writers,
composers, philosophers and various other high art
types. Here is a random sample:
“Timor mortis conturbat me.
The fear of death distresses me.
And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without
pictures or conversations?
BUY David Markson books online from and
There is no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt
is great. Mozart chamber music. Said Marlon Brando.
Eliot died of emphysema in conjunction with a damaged
heart.
Pound died of a blocked intestine.”
The final two entries here constitute the main bulk
of the whole book: reports on how famous artists and
thinkers died. Each page returns to this theme. As you
might expect, it has a strong melancholy edge. I understand
that Markson is elderly and unwell, so he has
good reason to dwell on such matters. Yet to describe
this book as a long lament about imminent demise is
to miss the overall effect. It is something wholly other
than melancholy.
At the beginning, the narrator, called simply “Writer”,
says he “is pretty much tempted to quit writing.
Writer is weary unto death of making up stories.” So
instead he presents this trance-like list. Some way
into the book Writer intervenes to suggest it is a prose
equivalent of Eliot’s The Wasteland. And for sure it
is like that poem, or a piece of music, specifically a
fugue (that is, “a polyphonic composition constructed
on one or more short themes which are harmonised
according to the laws of counterpoint” – OED). Very
soon, the reader is unable to escape the special rhythm
of anecdotes that at first seem to have absolutely nothing
to do with literature. Yet in the end, and for the
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