The crack-up
An intelligent review by Jennifer Howard of David Markson’s Vanishing Point (in the registration-requiring Washington Post). It is neither playfully dismissive nor reverential. So, a relief.
Such books are inevitably placed on the sidelines - even by those who enjoy and admire them; they exist behind the main, big novel action. Yet now that there are three such books - Reader’s Block and This is Not a Novel being the other two - perhaps as a single volume of 400 pages they might be regarded less as frivolous entertainments (which they are too) but as oddly serious.
Perhaps. But no. They work only as small, modest books. In my review of This is Not a Novel, I said that genre fiction - which is what even the big novels of our day amount to - deny death (in the widest sense). They “may help us through the day, but not our lives”. Oh yes. Save us from major novels!
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Brrrrrrains
- He gets paid for this
- Mr Twat reads Paul Auster
- This is not a blog
- The Big Sleep ..er, Read.
