Tripticks by Ann Quin

cw: suicide, mental illness, low self-esteem, substance use etc

Oh yes, Ann Quin.

A neglected friend of TriumpfOfTheNow.com, one of those rare writers who I both want to love but find her writing sometimes a little too difficult for my not-the-sharpest-tool-in-the-metaphor intellect…

Yes, this one is hard to hold onto, hard to stay on top of, unlike the earlier stories of The Unmapped Country (published 2018 and featuring writing from throughout Quin’s life, including pieces that post-date Tripticks) and the much earlier Berg (1964), which are more (BS) Johnsonian and less (Sammy “Hot Legs”) Beckettian (i.e. experimental but still readable to a big old dumb dumb like me (you don’t spend this much of you life being as miserable as I am if you’re not a total idiot: you change you change you change and you work effectively and you make things better instead of a different kind of worse (I’m a complete fucking idiot, by that reckoning; a fool, an absolute fucking embarrassment to the whole human race etc etc))

I’m stupid

I’m dumb dumb

I’m a fool

And what is this? What is Tripticks???

It’s from 1972, and part of this was written and previously published as the winner of a competition run by JG Ballard for writing produced “under the influence of drugs”, Quin citing her pharmacological influence as the contraceptive pill rather than the messier, recreational, options most of her competitors chose to indulge under (I consider writing rather than drug use the indulgence in that sentence)…

This isn’t, though, necessarily any indication that Tripticks will be less trippy or druggy (what does that mean?) -feeling than (one imagines) the rest of the writing Ballard received, in fact (given that it won the competition and given that intoxication is rarely (though not never) a genuinely useful tool for artistic construction) is probably more evocative of an altered state than writing scratched out while in one…

Quin’s writing here would be (and I think was) deep in the heady, swinging ’60s/swinging ’70s type of writing a typical reader would associate with hallucinogens and psychedelics (those might be synonyms but I don’t know, I don’t have much fun any more?)…

There is use of cut-ups here, there is weaving of dream and reality, of fantasy and reality, sex slides into violence into sex, past slips into present into future into different past, faces and places and people and memories are unstable, they shift like shifting sands (does sand shift or is it just sibilant?) – narrative and plot, too, fails to remain concrete…

Sometimes our narrator is following his “No. 1 X-wife and her schoolboy gigolo” and sometimes they are following him…

Sometimes they are driving one type of vehicle and sometimes that is his (or maybe that one does remain consistent but I’m so unfamiliar with American car brands that I got confused?) and as they traverse middle America (as in the middle of America rather than suburban America, which is what I’d mean if I said “middle England” (I mean what I’d actually mean if I said “middle England” is… well… y’know…))))))))-

As they traverse middle America,

It’s motels and memories, it’s discussion of high and low culture, of travel and movement, of frustration and elation, of joy and pain, of regret and of class and of failed attempts at life… It’s also a little racist in its depiction of indigenous north Americans, but it was 1972 and written by someone from the South East of England so it’s probably a bastion of progressive values compared to many of its contemporary depictions of the same groups of people…

I I I I I I

I suppose I liked it a lot, in hindsight…

I liked its structure and its energy (as in “pacing”), I liked the way it slipped and moved from place to memory and I liked its kinda sad hopelessness, its honest depiction of ones failure to find… I dunno… anything worth really holding onto in life…

So, maybe in hindsight I was able to enjoy it in the way in was meant to be consumed… maybe one isn’t expected to understand every paragraph on a sentence level, maybe Tripticks is meant to be seen as a journey rather than a destination, maaaaan.

Maybe I’m not too stupid to love Ann Quin?

Maybe I am, though, because I’ve got to be fucking stupid to still STILL STILL have not made myself a liveable life.

Whoops lol aha.

Order Tripticks direct from indie press & Other Stories (or and other stories, I don’t know if the ampersand is for the clothing brand or the publisher – either way the link should work)