The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Invisible Author: Last Essays, by Christine Brooke-Rose
reviewed by Richard J. Murphy

Christine Brooke-Rose. Invisible Author: Last Essays. Ohio State Univ. Press, 2002. 206 pp. $45.00.

Brooke-Rose takes her title from her experience as a writer; while she has a small group of faithful readers, she reflects on the unhappy idea that nobody seems to have noticed the self-imposed constraints within which she has attempted to work, e.g., the elimination of the verb “to be” in Between. This book consists of six previously published sections and three added chapters, a structured self-analysis. In it we meet the shrewdly acute intelligence and sensitive assiduity of a longtime innovator. She gives a brief history of narrative criticism, unveils the composing mind of an ingenious writer, and moves the critic’s attention away from the “story” to the devices, especially linguistic, that keep narrative alive. We might associate her with Roussel or Oulipo writers (Perec) as she analyzes the challenges and sense of verbal play that generate her fiction. Immersed in structuralism and theory, she applies the same incisiveness to critical problems as she has to those of narrative. The core of the work details her response to Alain Robbe-Grillet and his use of the “paradoxical” present tense, a challenge she has mastered. Having developed a strong interest in if not an obsession with the grammatical aspects of narrative structure, she writes close analyses of several of her works, e.g., Thru, and those of other critics and novelists, the most interesting of which examines Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Her reading ranges broadly and cuts deeply; her insistence on her invisibility, the problems of an “experimenter” increased by gender bias, strikes one as doubly unfortunate. Greater exposure to the fiction and criticism of Christine Brooke-Rose would benefit us all.