The Last Novel

The underappreciated US writer Gilbert Sorrentino wrote: "The critic is either subsumed in his criticism, the latter becoming, relentlessly and imperceptibly, a kind of natural effusion of the collective intelligence; or he is forever identified as "the one who said that..." and reviled for such rank stupidity. Either way, he is denied his reality, becoming in the first instance a public idea that everybody held all the time, and in the second, an idiot whose pronouncements are contemptible when they are not hilarious." David Markson in his latest work agrees with Sorrentino as he instructs and test reviewers, and other readers. "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." Aware of how pompous that may sound, and how difficult the task is, Markson immediately follows with: "Conclusions are the weak point of most authors. George Eliot said." "The Last Novel" is constituted of notes and quotations, which seem random, but they reveal their depth through repetition and elaboration. Certain threads - painting ("If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned. Said Shaw."), music ("That scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! Tchaikovsky's diary says."), and art ("People who actually believe that Christo's tangerine-colored bedsheets fluttering about in New York's Central Park had something even remotely to do with art.") - are of intense interest to the Novelist. However, a thread that is more consuming combines his loneliness ("Nobody comes. Nobody calls.") with the deaths of historical figures ("Karl Marx died sitting at his desk. Antonin Artaud, sitting up at the foot of his bed.") and friends. Personal remarks by Novelist stand out because they're touching - "Dialing the deceased, in the likelihood that no one would have yet disconnected their answering machines - and contemplating their voices one eerie final time" - or for their sheer ludicrousness: "The presumably apocryphal tale about a production of Othello by touring actors in the nineteenth-century American West - near the last lines of which a cowboy in the audience shot Iago dead on the spot." "The Last Novel" is the capstone to "Reader's Block" (1996), "This Is Not a Novel" (2001) and "Vanishing Point" (2004). Like those novels, it can be read on its own. The narrator remarks: "Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?" Markson's long career - which one hopes the title does not indicate is winding up - has given him the experience to devise a DIY review that removes his novel from the hands of Sorrentino's idiot. Novelist is "Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke. All of which obviously means that this is the last book Novelist is going to write." Lib

isn t it about time to move this modern master from cult figure to mainstream? the stormy genius of his writing is long overdue for recognition by the major literary world david markson's power and orginality are unmatched among american novelists

For nearly 50 years, David Markson's obscure genius has gone little noticed outside the close-knit New York literary world he inabits. In France they'd give him a medal and a pension, but this ain't France. "The Last Novel" is as good an entryway as any to the mind and soul of one of America's greatest living writers.

"The Last Novel" is David Markson's latest artistic triumph over mortality. It luminously demonstrates the author's (or Author's, as he is called in this book) ready wit, wide learning, and acute insights into the predicaments shared by aging artists, scientists, philosophers, and others who must struggle against the bathetic mundanities of life in order to produce their work, more often than not for a world that is incapable or unwilling to appreciate them in any but the most irrelevant terms. Markson is in fine form in this trenchant, memorable piece that one dearly hopes will not be his last.