I finished off The Last Novel while sitting poolside suffering a monstrous earache, the kind that feels like someone pushed an egg into your ear while you were asleep and now the frantic little bird hatched from therein is pecking its way out.
It’s a malady similar to writer’s block, the kind that elicits a skeptical “Really? It’s that bad?” when complained about, but yes, it is, and it must be suffered through to the end. Like a book. Like a life.
This situation is nearly ideal for taking on the late Markson’s fragmented, anecdotal style because you disappear in the white shock of ear pain just as the protagonist simply named Novelist does in the confines of his apartment. You are, like Novelist, only able to relate to the world in spurts, through the failings, triumphs and quirks of others. Their deaths, listed in the following peculiar manner:
October 24, 1725, Alessandro Scarlatti died on.
are very nearly envied, but not really. Nobody living really wants to die; they just want to live. Like I did right there; after reading The Last Novel, you start talking in bon mots like those of all the clever people pondered throughout this book.
The unceasing preoccupation with mariageableness and/or the economics of same in Jane Austen.
Suicide is more respectable, Emerson said.
You will, upon finishing or when you give up on finishing this book, most likely be compelled to write such a book, culled together from fragments that, theoretically, reveal a True Whole at the end. One imagines that Reality Hunger guy was compelled as such; or that the much clever-er Padgett Powell sought a better solution with endless questions in his own “novel.” You should think about doing such a thing, maybe ever jot down a couple of these anecdotes and fragments on your iPhone like I did while sitting beside the pool I cannot enjoy because of my stupid ear problems, but unless you are as smart a guy as David Markson, you should probably leave it at that.
Markson’s Novelist is imbued with the end-of-line nihilist wisdom that Beckett’s great figures exhibit; a wisdom that they know nothing in the end. Novelist, when he surfaces every 15 pages or so, does effectless things like rummage the closet for the shirt he is already wearing. There is one moment of shocking action in the book (I won’t spoil it for you) but it will later be revealed to be not what you think.
Unlike Beckett, though, there is a weird relief to be found when finishing the book. It’s like you (or Novelist, whichever you prefer) have been collecting these little quotes like a rooftop loony does pigeons in a dazzling array of little cages, and at the end the latches are flung open and you expect to be showered in a torrent of shit and feathers as they flee their capture, but when you cease wincing, you see them calmly cooing in their cages, comfortable after being around you so long. What you are going to do with all these pigeons now is anyone’s guess, but they are happily yours. You will do as Jan van Eyck inscribed on a painting once, reiterated in the last fragment of the book:
Als ick kan.
