Woulda Coulda Nominate a Book

Following the bandwagon (which by the way was literally a wagon to hold the whole band), I've been thinking about books I might have nominated for this round of the LBC. I'm by the no means a prolific reader of current fiction. I tend to reach back a little further in time with my reading. The first book that comes to mind doesn't fit into the twelve month window we've adopted, though only by a few months: David Markson's Vanishing Point. If someone asked me to list my favorite writers, I might haw and hem over it, but I've no doubt that Markson would be in the top three. For me, he encompasses so much of what I want out of a book: intelligence, humor, emotion, knowledge, and, best of all, formal inventiveness. His books even maintain a kind of formal/thematic progression through time. The voracious reader can follow his progression from one book to the next as he refines his style. Starting out as an interesting high modernist (Faulkner and Joyce) with his Going Down (1970) he has become a wholly original author of books that are small pieces of brilliance. Vanishing Point in this regard is like a summing up.

Early on the book describes itself as: "Non-linear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage... A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel". The premise is that of "Author" organizing his notecards in preparation to write. The majority of the book consists of a collage of biographical and historical facts, mostly about artists, writers, musicians, and philosophers, though occasionally other figures make appearances. Within this collage "Author" makes the occasional appearance. It seems like a rather banal factbook, but these collaged facts are mostly small tragedies and the weight of their build-up along with "Authors" story leads to a very powerfully emotional ending. The parts interact with each other, sometimes explicitly, sometimes in ways that after a few readings I am still trying to figure out.

Here's a small passage from the book:

"Mr. Eliot's work is no doubt brilliant, but it is not exactly the kind of material we care to add to our list.

Said the British publisher John Lane of a submission--after Eliot had published Prufrock

The publisher did not care to add brilliant material to his list."

For more on Markson see my site page on him.

For a brief look at Vanishing Point, you can view some of it at Google Print (Hint: try searching for a name in the book, then you can see a few pages of the text.)

Comments

[TEV]

It's also worth noting that "Going Down" has just been rather handsomely reissued. (A review copy showed up last week to my great delight.)

[derik]

Thanks Mark. I didn't know about that one.

[Matt Cheney]

I'm glad you're bringing some notice to Markson, Derik. I saw "Going Down" at a bookstore the other day, though, needing to watch the budget these days, didn't pick it up. I adored "Wittgenstein's Mistress" -- easily one of my favorite novels -- and had mixed feelings about "Reader's Block" and "This is Not a Novel". Markson began to seem like he was recycling the same trick again and again, and since I thought it worked so well with the concept of WM, I just couldn't get very interested in the technique applied to different circumstances and conceits. So I have not yet gotten to "Vanishing Point", though probably will soon. Your intro to Markson on your site stops at "Reader's Block", and I'd be very curious to know how you see the novels from WM to VP as developments....

[derik]

Matt, "This is Not a Novel" may actually be my favorite of Markson's. I'll admit that the last three are very similar. One can almost view them as a trilogy of sorts. They tell a progressive story both from the point of Markson's writing development and the "author" character within. I don't see the latter novels as recycling WM though. They are a continued distillation of story, subsumed into a collage of other lives, facts, and history. In its own way (and something he probably would not like) it is rather Web like.

Yes, the site needs updating, that's on the list of things to update.

[Matt Cheney]

Thinking of RB, TiNaN, and VP as a trilogy is interesting -- at the end of "This is Not a Novel" I seem to remember thinking of the writer character as terminally ill -- does "Vanishing Point" go into that more?

[derik]

Yes, it does. (Now I'm giving away things. I better write up a paper about this trilogy thing quick before someone else does.)

[Health News]

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