MARY

THE LAST NOVEL IDEA?

Jean-Pierre Lacrampe

The Last Novel
by David Markson
Shoemaker & Hoard
May 2007
208 pp.
$15.00, paperback original

David Markson is an author well-known for his obscurity, remaining an inconspicuous force in literary fiction for the past twenty years and a victim to the ever-growing, ironic trend in literature: that the writers who try their hardest to duck categorization end up accumulating the most tags. Markson's career has been laden with more labels than laurels (experimental fiction, postmodern, avant-garde, etc.)—making him, for many of us, a sort of high-brow Rodney Dangerfield, forever disrespected by the mainstream. Yet, when asked about his narrow acclaim, Markson, in an interview with Bookslut.com, replied humbly:

Listen, you write the way you do because you have to, and because it's who you are. But nice things happen too, reputation or no. Just recently, for example, a letter from someone here in town, whom I don't know at all, wanting nothing, simply telling me that if I need anything—if I want to say "lift this" or "move that"—I should give him a call. Or someone else, saying that he's recently read Wittgenstein for a second time, and that he did it aloud, sitting alone in his apartment and speaking the entire book to himself, simply to capture the rhythms and taking two days to do so. . . . What more can someone in my position ask for? In some small way you're finally paying back the debt you owe to those books that moved you and got you started in the first place.

In his latest work, The Last Novel, Markson continues the archival project he started in 1996 with Reader's Block. Now the fourth in this vein (along with 2001's This is Not a Novel and 2004's Vanishing Point), The Last Novel resumes Markson's self-conscious experiments with the premise and expectations of a novel, as he excises the normative elements of plot and setting (and, for the most part, character). Instead, Markson organizes—largely through theme—a series of encyclopedia-like snippets, anecdotes, or short entries of trivia concerning the lives and works of artists and socio-political leaders, and their frequent intersection and collision. Here's an example of the format and content from The Last Novel:

"Wear a sweatband."

    Adolf Hitler's occupation, as listed on his tax returns until such time as he officially became Germany's chancellor:
    Writer.
    A debris of sour jokes, stage anger, dirty words, synthetic loneliness, and the sort of antic behavior children fall back into when they know they are losing our attention.
    The New Yorker called Catch-22.

The sole conventional character in Markson's The Last Novel is the narrator—referred to only as Novelist—who appears sporadically and usually directly references the novel itself. For instance, Novelist describes the project within which he narrates as "Non-linear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel. And thus in which Novelist will say more about himself only when he finds no way to evade doing so, but rarely otherwise." Markson carefully tempers this experimental gamesmanship with the concreteness of his anecdotal snippets, layering themes as though the novel were deftly grafted on onion skin—without much of the smell.

I'd rather not sing than sing quiet.
Janis Joplin said.
The sound of Bix Beiderbecke's cornet:
Like a girl saying yes, Eddie Condon said.

To fully appreciate The Last Novel's subtle thematic layering requires an unusual amount of mental exertion (wear a sweatband). Essentially, Markson uses theme as a character. And it's an easier thread for readers to lose than, say, a concrete name like George. Nonetheless, Markson's snippets slowly crochet out his themes—or characters—of poverty and the artist, adultery, anti-Semitism, sexism, racism, posthumous fame, critics' opinions of artists, artists' opinions of artists, and patronage, charting their intersections.
The Last Novel is a literary work done in pointillism, with the patterns of Markson's entries, while still enjoyable as individual entities, emerging only when the reader temporarily zooms out. Or, as Novelist grumpily explains it:

His last book. All of which also then gives Novelist carte blanche to do anything here he damned well pleases.
Which is to say, writing in his own personal genre, as it were.

    It should be noted that Markson's archive of anecdotes and allusions throughout the three previous works, and now in The Last Novel, remains glaringly incomplete, with the majority of entries focusing on European and American males from specific time periods (Modernism, the Age of Reason, the Renaissance, etc.). The Last Novel reads like a line-up of all of Western culture's usual suspects, though certainly not exclusively. Yet, it is difficult (or rather easier) to lay this fault with Markson's pen. If his archive is genuine—a faithful reproduction of the historic intersections between art and society—blame rests in the actual artistic and societal institutions Markson dutifully records, and not with the cataloguer. What The Last Novel offers readers, then, is a bird's-eye view of art and society's macro-movements—the elements that change over time, and those that don't. It's a valuable, interesting viewpoint.
    But the aesthetic and thematic similarities between Markson's last four works do call into question the necessity of The Last Novel. And, while the note of emphasis in each of Markson's four archival novels differs slightly, this is, by and large, a fair concern. Nobody wants to invest in a one-trick pony, let alone a stable of four. However, it is through Markson's expert layering of themes that The Last Novel—much like the microcosm of individual entries and snippets contained within—works as both a singular novel and as an integral part of Markson's collected archival project, with the narrator's evolving emotional stakes (his continuing anxiety over legacy in direct contrast to his iconoclastic impulses) and thematic relationships building in each work and culminating in The Last Novel.
    In short, Markson, through literary bricolage and the precise organization of theme, is able to consistently resurrect feeling from the obscure anecdotes and quotations of (primarily) dead white men—again, without much of the smell. The result is a sort of surprising hug—distanced but still enjoyable. This enjoyment comes from the varied sources of Markson's individual snippets, as well as their constant connections to the larger themes of his archive.
    So, as I finally closed shut the cover of The Last Novel, liberally daubing the sweat from my brow, I couldn't help but think that the soft clap of the pages closing is one of only a few rounds of applause as yet garnered by Markson's inconspicuously brilliant literary career—and how it is a clap so richly deserved.