The Review of Contemporary Fiction

This Is Not a Novel by David Markson
Paul Maliszewski

David Markson. This Is Not a Novel. Counterpoint, 2001. 190 pp. Paper: $15.00.

David Markson’s new book ventures fearlessly in the direction pointed to by his most recent two novels, Wittgenstein’s Mistress and Reader’s Block. In form, it most closely resembles the latter, with writers in both setting down quotations from books, anecdotes about artists, and the remains of their reading lives. The stories in Reader’s Block—about publishing’s long history of successfully overlooking one worthy book after another, about writers not finding readers, about artists dying and the frustration dealt them before they do—have, in the new book, given way more completely to anecdotes about artists dying. Yet despite the similarities, This Is Not a Novel is not the darker sequel to Reader’s Block. If the earlier book was a skeleton, still standing and miraculously supporting itself, then this new one is a careful arrangement of bones on the ground. In Reader’s Block, the writer seemed to be planning to write another novel, one with a protagonist and a story that appeared in quick glimpses. In the new book, Writer is writing This Is Not a Novel, and that is the only plan. He is “pretty much tempted to quit writing” in the book’s first line and “weary unto death of making up stories” in the second. He wants no characters, so there is only Writer writing. He wants no “intimation of story,” no plot or action, no conflict, no motivation, no setting or descriptions, no “sequence of events,” and no “indicated passage of time.” Markson sets aside all these elements; he has subtracted all that was left to subtract. What remains is part commonplace book, part melancholic catalog of loss, part fugue, part epic poem of unnumbered cantos, part portrait of the artist, and, taken as a whole, a great read—a read really like no other. [Paul Maliszewski]