David Markson - Late Novels

Late Novels

Markson's late works further refine the allusive, minimalist style of Wittgenstein's Mistress. In these novels most of the traditional comforts of the form are absent, as an author-figure closely identified with Markson himself considers the travails of the artist throughout the history of culture. In Reader's Block, he is called Reader; in This Is Not A Novel, Writer; Vanishing Point, Author; in Markson's last novel, The Last Novel, he is known as Novelist. Markson described the action of these novels: "I have characters sitting alone in a bedroom with a head full of everything he’s ever read." His working process involved "scribbling the notes on three-by-five-inch index cards" and collecting them in "shoebox tops" until they were ready to be put "into manuscript form." Markson hoped that these four novels might eventually be published together in one volume.

The first in the “personal genre”, Reader's Block, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1996. It was followed by This Is Not A Novel (Counterpoint, 2001), Vanishing Point (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004) and The Last Novel (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). Of Reader's Block, fellow writer and friend Kurt Vonnegut wrote, "David shouldn’t thank Fate for letting him write such a good book in a time when large numbers of people could no longer be wowed by a novel, no matter how excellent."

The second book, This Is Not a Novel, describes itself in a number of terms:

• "A novel"
• "An epic poem"
• "A sequence of cantos awaiting numbering"
• "A mural of sorts"
• "An autobiography"
• "A continued heap of riddles"
• "A polyphonic opera of a kind"
• "A disquisition on the maladies of the life of art"
• "An ersatz prose alternative to The Waste Land"
• "A treatise on the nature of man"
• "An assemblage "
• "A contemporary variant on "
• "A kind of verbal fugue"
• "A classic tragedy "
• "A volume entitled 'Writer's Block'"
• "A comedy of a sort"
• "His synthetic personal Finnegans Wake"
• "Nothing more than a fundamentally recognizable genre all the while"
• "Nothing more or less than a read"
• "An unconventional, generally melancholy though sometimes even playful now-ending read"

In This Is Not a Novel, the Writer character states, "A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive." " Reader's Block likewise calls itself "a novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel." Rather than consisting of a specific plot, they can be said to be composed of "an intellectual ragpicker's collection of cultural detritus."" The seemingly-random set of quotes, ideas and nuggets of information about the lives of various literary, artistic and historical figures cohere to form a new kind of novel.