This Is Not A Novel by David Markson

I don’t remember where or when I heard about this long out of print post-modernist novel (it’s definitely a novel, whatever that means (in my opinion)), but it’s been on my occasionally updated book-buying list for literally years, so when I saw it for sale in that weird secondhand market place in Brighton (Scavenger’s Paradise or Hoarder’s Heaven or Scrounger’s Cove or Pirate’s Bazaar or something like that?) while browsing on the 21st December 2023, I had to have it, even though it was £10, which is a high price for a secondhand paperback most people haven’t heard of, but it is the right price.

A secondhand bookseller should always know the value of their stock.

I was happy to pay and I’m happy I bought it.

And then read it over Christmas and I’m happy I did that, too.

Or maybe not happy, as it’s quite sad, but satisfied. Satiated. Fulfilled. Ready to switch from this to the handful of niche experimental books I got for Christmas, anyway…

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This Is Not A Novel pitches itself as an anti-novel, intentionally trying to eschew character, plot, description, narrative, metaphor, imagery, consistency, meaning and message while still hitting the word count, and while still functioning as a written text that a reader wants to engage with.

The fact that the book (published 2001) is now hard to find speaks to its success in not being a traditionally structured and received bestseller, though its wild readability, its difficulty to be put down and its sheer pacy intensity evidences its success at being engaging and powerful. I would argue, though, that with this power comes an emotionality, a clarity of meaning and purpose that speaks articulately to its ability to function as a novel in every way that matters, in spite of its clear subversion of the form…

The novel is sentences, sometimes tiny paragraphs but mainly just sentences, offering thoughts, comments, descriptions, tiny anecdotes, facts, trivia, literary and cultural analysis, mini-memoir, miniature literary biography, short form criticism, most of it – tho not all of it – about death, including circumstances of death, locations of death and times or moments of deaths, referring to the lives of many real, fictional and mythical people…

Though there is a (capitalised) “Writer” present who is collating these sentences (and who expresses the intention and premise of the book), there are tens, hundreds, of artists, writers, musicians, politicians, critics (and other people), whose works, whose lives, whose deaths are depicted and described in crisp and direct rapidity…

The novel, then, is a collage of feeling, yet also of statement, a collage of tone, a depiction and a comparison evoking the significant similarities and the trivial differences between supposedly divergent lives…

20th century modernist European novelists, 19th century American presidents, medieval kings and emperors, Renaissance oil painters, Classical philosophers and playwrights, Biblical figures, the characters from ancient myths, they all coexist and are co-referenced beside and around each other, forming forming forming a coherent whole and a readable “story”: we are all so fucking human and so fucking mortal and absolute nothing fucking matters except for things that we choose to believe matter. If we choose to believe nothing matters, then that becomes so. If we choose to believe everything matters, then likewise. Life’s a drag… Too much yet not enough. When will it when will it when will it be over???

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Markson mentions Proust and Pythagoras, references Lowry and Lincoln, discusses —-ok I can’t be bothered to do more alliterative pairs but I think you get it?

This is complex yet simple, it is disconnected yet a clear whole, it contains juxtaposition but also connectedness…

It is an internet novel published before mass uptake of the internet, it is a precursor to essential and (imo) contemporary literature defining texts like Only Americans Burn In Hell…

It is a mind spread out on the page, it is consciousness and thought, it is idea and memory, it is statement and question and manifesto and artwork all at the same time.

Did I like it? I think so.

Will I read it again? Almost certainly, yes. There’s something here I’d like to understand better. Or there’s an absence here that I’d like to be able to have found… If this book is a failure, then I’d like to be able to understand that…

No.

This is poetry.

This is a novel composed in tweets years before Twitter existed… This is digressive and distracted and bored of literature, yet never boring or bored by the potentials of art, of meaning, of culture.

I think it’s probably quite important.

I think it’s probably pretty quite maybe great?

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I was going to link to the publisher webpage but couldn’t find it. I did discover, though, that this book is written about by book bloggers a lot, so I’m sure to get some comments from people who think I’m too left wing or stupid below shortly, so let’s all look forward to that this holiday season!!!