Like Reader's Block, The Last Novel is more than the sum of its fascinating parts. A sense of tragedy grows and grows as it gathers mass and momentum, finally to break over the reader like a great wave. Who is this tragedy's subject? You, me, and the co-denizens of this quirky, treacherous world. ( )

The Last Novel is a quick, easy, charming, sad, profound, surprising, humorous, angry, erudite, critical, clever, bitter, energetic, thought-provoking, challenging, heavy, light, experimental non-novel.

Novel? Perhaps the title is satirical. He calls it a novel, which may be intended as a form of challenge to "the novel" or more likely a joke and a sarcastic one at that. It's a book, certainly. But novel? It's like trying to force a Mormon through a keyhole. Why make "the novel" take on the burden of the avant-garde? Just call it a book. It's non-narrative. The small snippets from the "author" inserted throughout what is otherwise a series of quotations do not make a novel. They make for...brief author-character quotations. Whether the "character" is the same as "the author" is a dead question. Pointless! This character accretes some attributes: he is a writer; he is poor; agèd; lonely. Bitter. It becomes fictionalized simply by putting it into a book that isn't categorized as autobiography. (And even then, any biography, auto- or not, is subject to the hypocrisy of memory, wish fulfillment, and the best intentions.) But so what? A few snippets of fictionalized self-expression buried within something more akin to Roget's Thesaurus do not make for a novel. But they do make for a fascinating text.

Last? The irony (or intention?) that this was his last book before his death (did he know he'd die before writing another?) adds poignancy to the author-character's quips. To some extent, the title also expresses the author's ego. The title resonates between irony and sincerity (After ME, there is NO OTHER!) The Last Novel is not the death or even the far end of the novel, so it doesn't work very well as an intentional statement that nothing further can be done to deconstruct the novel's form because frankly I think this book crossed the line into the world outside the novel space. The title's meaning to me weighs more heavily on the side of Woody Allen. Self-mockery through arrogant assertion.

99% of the content in The Last Novel is a carefully curated collection of quotations (perhaps paraphrased in some cases?) and anecdotes regarding diverse historical figures and artists. The subject matter generally circles around repeated themes, the primary ones that stuck out to me are: religion, racism, criticism, and the value of art. His position around racism? Opposed. Religion? Also opposed. Mostly focuses on the hypocrisy and absurdity of religion and religious dogma. Here he expends the majority of his critique on Christianity and Islam with, to my mind, Judaism getting a pass. Most references to Jews are as victims, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust. There's plenty to critique in the world of the Orthodox and Israel, so I'm going to say he's a little soft on the Jews. Criticism? He works both sides of the fence here. He sometimes quotes artists who hate on critics (and himself presents a backhand slap at critics claiming that most who read The Last Novel won't even notice the occasional character-author insertions), but then he goes on to quote authors and artists themselves being "critics" and harshing on other creators. Many of these one sentence critiques are quite hilarious. So I guess the point is that criticism is great...unless it's against you!

The theme that stood out the most prominently was around the value of art (both literary and otherwise). I might even go so far as to say that, primarily, The Last Novel is an homage to art and a challenge to the value of art. The poignancy that flickers in the background of all the anecdotes is the sense that Markson is wondering if the struggle was worth it. Will his writing be a worthy legacy? What is the point of his art after his death? Sometimes the anecdotes highlight the great value that some of us find in art. And in other cases, his selections highlight how easily art can be forgotten, destroyed, or become irrelevant.

Let me acknowledge that much of the greatness of this book is borrowed interest. But ... again I say, so what? I've never read such a brilliant collection of brilliant quotes. It's all in the curation. Let's call it a remix of history. What follows is a selection of various anecdotes to give you a taste of the style.


Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Said Cyril Connolly.

Man: But a little soul bearing about a corpse.
Marcus Aurelius says Epictetus said.

Now that a certain portion of mankind does not believe at all in the existence of the gods, a rational legislation ought to do away with the oaths.
Wrote Plato—2,310 years before an act of the United States Congress added the phrase under God to the Pledge of Allegiance.

The first priest was the first rogue who crossed paths with the first fool.
Voltaire also said.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what if feels about dogs.
Said John Osborne.

As his once extraordinary fame in France's literary world faded, Chateaubriand also became extremely hard of hearing.
He only thinks he is deaf because he no longer hears himself talked about, Talleyrand said.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's addiction to morphine.
And/or ether.

A seminonfictional semifiction.
And with its interspersed unattributed quotations at roughest count adding up to a hundred or more.*

I have never been surprised to find men wicked, but I have often been surprised to find them not ashamed.
Said Swift.

The severest test of the imagination—is to name a cat.
Said Samuel Butler.

A reference to the good old hearty female stench, unquote.
Which Pound excised from Eliot's manuscript of The Waste Land.**

When a head and a book collide, and one sounds hollow—is it always the book?
Asked Lichtenberg.

Unlike most Italians, Joe DiMaggio never reeks of garlic.
Life magazine matter-of-factly took note of in 1939.

It's a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.
Quote Grace Paley.

Chloroform in print.
Mark Twain called the Book of Mormon.

Thy labours shall outlive thee.
Wrote John Fletcher in lines dedicated to Ben Jonson.
Who spent his last years partially paralyzed and virtually alone—and in calamitous want.

*note Markson's own description of this book

**I hate The Wasteland. Reading it is like choking down a dust sandwich.



An impossible to categorize work, The Last Novel is thought provoking and such a fast read that you've no excuse for not giving it a try. Highly recommended.
( )

I'm not really sure what to say of this (a collage of anecdotes?), but I liked it a lot. ( )

What happens when a novelist writes a book so poor that it not only fails in itself, but reveals the novelist's other works as failures?

I am so sorry I read this. After reading "Wittgenstein's Mistress," I was eager to see what else Markson had done. This novel, judged just for itself, is extremely weak: it depends on a ploy, which Markson announces: he will keep himself out of the book as much as possible, and fill it instead with facts and anecdotes about painters, composers, and writers. As a postmodern ploy, it has potential. But the few passages about "Novelist," as he calls himself, seem random - and not in an aleatoric, combinatorial, Oulipean, or Cagean sense. They are simply weakly imagined. The anecdotes, which fill the book, are often stories about unrecognized fame: a plausible but unpromising and unreflective (unintentionally unpleasant) subject for an aging, relatively unrecognized novelist. And many others are stocks-in-trade of the arts and humanities. (I seem to write this a lot: but any review that refers to an author's erudition is going to be off the mark: the imaginary ideal reader should be the one to whom the erudite references are all known, and therefore not erudite. The question then remains: are they interesting references?)

So the book itself is disappointing, but I am sadder that this book partly ruined Markson's "Wittgenstein's Mistress" for me, because it shows that the desperate self-control of the narrator in that book is actually an easy fabrication comprised of strings of random references. The Wittgensteinian feel of that book depends very much on the illusion that there is an "investigation," in Wittgenstein's sense, of the facts the narrator can remember. But "The Last Novel" shows that the parallels, resonances, and recurring references are loosely done, and mainly fortuitous. In addition -- most damaging for me -- the few references to Wittgenstein in "The Last Novel" show Markson knows, actually, very little about Wittgenstein, so little that I doubt he even intended the narrator in "Wittgenstein's Mistress" to be exploring the kind of "investigation," or experiencing the kind of linguistic and logical isolation, that I take it Wittgenstein experienced. On p. 44, for example, the "Novelist" notes

"Wittgenstein's shockingly limited aesthetic sensibilities in every area except music. His virtual consecration of third-rate American pulp fiction detective stories, for instance."

Aside from the dubiousness of that first sentence (what about architecture? what about Wittgenstein's patronage of Trakl? etc.) the second sentence betrays a deep misunderstanding. Wittgenstein loved detective comics (not even just "stories") because they were antidotes to thinking. He would have hated those sentences.

What happens when a novelist writes a book so poor it infects and undermines his better work? Readers are compelled to try to forget what they've read. ( )

snipits of ideas - not a true novel didn't finish ( )