The Last Novel [Paperback]

David Markson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 16, 2007

In recent novels, which have been called “hypnotic,” “stunning,” and “exhilarating,” David Markson has created his own personal genre. In this new work, The Last Novel, an elderly author (referred to only as “Novelist”) announces that since this will be his final effort, he has “carte blanche to do anything he damned well pleases.”

Pressed by solitude and age, Novelist's preoccupations inevitably turn to the stories of other artists — their genius, their lack of recognition, and their deaths. Keeping his personal history out of the story as much as possible, Novelist creates an incantatory stream of fascinating triumphs and failures from the lives of famous and not-so-famous painters, writers, musicians, sports figures, and scientists.

As Novelist moves through his last years, a minimalist self-portrait emerges, becoming an intricate masterpiece from David Markson's astonishing imagination. Through these startling, sometimes comic, but often tragic anecdotes we unexpectedly discern the entire shape of a man's life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The latest engaging, indefinable work from Markson (Vanishing Point) proves to be something between a writer's commonplace book and La Rochefoucauld's satirically aphoristic Maxims. A set of absorbing factoids and musings—from and about a variety of literary and historical notables—comprise his narrator's last novel. With a delight in experimentation, Markson manages to insinuate a sober narrative voice between and among the words of the greats. After a quote from Eugene V. Debs (Nobody can be nobody) comes a telling moment of clarification about his own text's aim: Novelist's personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referenced and of cryptic interconnectivity syntax. Indeed, the quotations, separated by a poetic amount of white space, read smoothly one after the other. Most are only a few lines long, and they range from bons mots by famous writers (Rousseau: The man who eats in idleness what he has not earned is a thief) to the writerly non sequitur (Napoleon was five feet six inches tall). Old age, defeat and death emerge as leitmotifs, underscored by statements of the places and dates of various authors' deaths, and, slowly, of the narrator's own poverty and loneliness. Markson's dark fragments are, paradoxically, a joy to sift and ponder.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

"Is there one major Dostoevsky novel in which no one commits suicide?" "Lenin played tennis." These trivia bits and much more fill the pages of Markson's latest experimental work, a hybrid novel and fun-fact compendium that will have many rushing for their Bartlett's and others clutching their skulls in despair. There is an aged protagonist named Novelist who periodically pops up among the anecdotes and quotations, often to comment wearily on his depression, and Markson uses this sort-of character to create a sort of tension--who is Novelist, and why is he or she obsessed with gossip, coincidences, facetiae, and death? Literary sleuths might find satisfaction in Markson's sporadic clues, but some will find that the book too closely resembles a cleverly sequenced quote-a-day desk calendar. Most intriguing (and problematic) is Markson/Novelist's tendency to anticipate reader complaints, a tactic that could engage fans of meta-lit but aggravate those tired of blog-style self-consciousness. There's a lulling beauty here--and a crackling wit, too--but readers will have to ask themselves: Does the end of this "seminonfictional semifiction" justify the means? Daniel Krause
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (March 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593761430
• ISBN-13: 978-1593761431
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #369,478 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A NEW SEMINONFICTIONAL SEMIFICTION July 8, 2007

By William Meisel

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Markson's works consist of short factoids about artists' (including writers, poets, painters, etc.) births, deaths, and strange or unusual experiences. Wedged in among these are bits of a storyline about an novelist who is writing his last book. Markson's game is to have fewer and fewer of these bits of authorial storyline in each novel while still creating the impression that there is a fictional author behind the factoids you are reading. It's a bit tough to explain. I recommend that you use Amazon's "look inside" feature and read the first few pages. If you like them, I expect you will enjoy the entire novel. Recommended.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, though not successful January 4, 2010

By Steiner VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

David Markson's fragmentary little work of aphorisms revolve primarily around anecdotes from the lives of great artists and thinkers. It's the kind of thing that is meant to displace our commonplace notions of what fiction is supposed to be, yet it never really becomes greater than the sum of its miniature parts. The style of Markson's musings is clearly informed by Wittgenstein's 'Culture and Value,' a brief collection of fragmentary comments on music and art. Markson seeks to unify these tidbits of data through the eyes of 'the novelist,' the unnamed collector and organizer of the project, but the supposed narrative of the novelist never congeals. Moreover, I found Marksons' Islamaphobia more than tiresome; the only tidbits regarding Arab culture include data about them burning books or killing Jews. Additionally, Markson is clearly preoccupied with the reception of artwork as a whole, probably more than a third of the fragments involve the missed appreciation for great artists. Don't get me wrong, this is an entertaining read, but far from a great one.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Markson smartly updated a biblical characterization: "Now Barrabas was a book reviewer." April 12, 2009

By Midwest Book Review

Format:Paperback

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." Liberty "gives Novelist carte blanche to do anything here he damned well pleases." What will be the reaction? "Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That's all there is, those little things?" Those who receive his novels free and are paid to review them are even more obtuse. "Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over. Like their grandly perspicacious uncles - who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also."

Those who are less well-read have responded to the veracity of "those little things," and Markson rebuts them sharply: "Reviewers who have accused Novelist of inventing some of his anecdotes and/or quotations - without the elemental responsibility to do the checking that would verify every one of them." That's a just charge that can't be refuted.

"For no reason whatsoever, Novelist has just flung his cat out one of his four-flights-up front windows." This is startling, as well as puzzling. A few pages later all is revealed: "Novelist does not own a cat, and thus most certainly could not have thrown one out a window." (Not quite; not having his own cat doesn't preclude Novelist from throwing some other cat out a window.) "Nonetheless he would lay odds that more than one hopscotching reviewer will be reading carelessly enough here to never notice these two sentences and announce that he did so." That's a neat trick to get a reviewer re-reading - or more precisely, reading in the first place. (Yet Markson himself has been lured by the tendency to read quickly. As he said in an interview with Bookslut in 2005, "all those intellectual bits and pieces in my later books, I've had to do a lot of browsing to hunt them out. At times it's almost gotten me into a habit of skimming instead of seriously reading. It's something I have to fight, repeatedly.")

"Taking no more account of the wind that comes out of their mouths than that which they expel from their lower parts. Leonardo described his response to critics as." Despite this quotation, Markson might have appreciated Catherine Texier's opinion in the "New York Times" that "The Last Novel" is a "tour de force" that "manages to keep us enthralled... and even moved to tears at the end." By the close we are more conscious of Novelist's deepening crisis, and to the emotional resonance of the work. Novelist talks of his economic state, his isolation, the lack of recognition, and the unhappy results of a bone scan. We are brought, with elegance and style, with dry wit and orneriness, to elegy.

But what do I know? In "Vanishing Point" Markson smartly updated a biblical characterization: "Now Barrabas was a book reviewer."

Jeff Bursey
Reviewer