This is a less experimental novel from Markson, but the intelligence still leaps from the page. It's also damn sexy. A blurb calls it Joycean. Yes, I can see that. Funny, allusive, dirty, sensual. (But don't be scared off. It's a lot easier, quicker read than anything ol' Jamesy ever wrote.) ( )

Not the Markson I love. I'm a huge fan of The Last Novel and [b:Wittgenstein's Mistress|51506|Wittgenstein’s Mistress|David Markson|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347696167s/51506.jpg|1278359], but I found Springer's Progress to be unrewarding. Purely from a reader response point-of-view, the main character was irritating. Yes, he is kind of an asshole. Assholes are fine in literature because they are honest. But irritating for the duration is unacceptable. Sure, people scrape their nails on chalkboards in real life but would you listen to a song of someone doing it for 10 minutes? My issues with the character were compounded by a distinctive and irritating writing style. When the premise at the end was revealed, I did find it to be a clever conceit, but clever didn't save the entire story leading up to that point.

First, Springer. He’s a writer, mostly fiction...various novels of some modest critical acclaim. Two pre-teen children, a wife who is a literary agent. So far, so good. He's got "writer's block." All right, a stereotypical writer's flaw but tolerable. He hasn't written for years and is living off his wife's salary. Sponging, really, because he's not even making an effort. Instead, he spends just about every waking minute at the pub. (c.f. "What do you call a writer who can't write? An alcoholic.") And chasing women. He has brief affairs as frequently as possible. An alcoholic writer with writer's block who cheats on his wife as frequently as possible. And most despicably to my mind…what made him loathsome...he barely acknowledges the existence of his own children. The children are there in passing for a few moments, but he has nothing to do with them. And Markson, frankly, doesn't even seem to reference them in any significant way. There is enough hemming and hawing in guilt over the affairs (mild guilt), but very little attention paid to the children. As if writers have more important things to do. And this angered me quite a lot. It could be simply my reader response, but I felt that while Markson recognized Springer was a cad, he didn’t really consider the relationship between father and children to be significant enough to apply to the equation.

And yet, despite all this, the book is, for the most part, a comedy. Even an erotic comedy, with a smattering of graphic sexual detail. The style of comedy rests primarily on exaggeratedly witty banter between intellectual literary-types. I found it rather farcical (i.e. far-fetched) for the most part. If you can imagine a couple of English professors spouting off one-liner double entendres about obscure classics, then you get the idea. Sometimes humorous, mostly cringeworthy.

Near the beginning, Springer sleeps with a young writer named Jessica Cornford, and for the first time becomes utterly obsessed with a woman. In particular, her ass. I am not kidding. He is obsessed with her body and her ass. And then he runs away from her because he’s scared he likes her too much. After that, he becomes incredibly jealous of her other relationships (she is, it turns out, highly promiscuous) and begins a cat & mouse game of trying to sleep with her again, but she teases and taunts him repeatedly. He seems to think he's in love with her, but he is really just obsessed with her and can't seem to tell the difference. Further, the novel seems to imply that she slept with him because she wanted him to edit her novel that needs a lot of help, but he is blind to this.

All in all, I found just about everything about Springer unsympathetic. He came across as a big waste of space, which made it difficult to enjoy the comedy. Sponging off the wife he's cheating on. Not caring about his kids. Jealous and pathetic.

And then on top of that, I found the style of the writing somewhat grating. Style: clipped. The story is told with emphasis on dialogue. Some internal thoughts and modest scenic description. It rolls forward with an odd abbreviated style, representing a novel that was written in outline. Written all in a tumble and a rush. Admittedly, at the end of the story, when the "concept" was revealed, the style made sense. But that didn't make it any more pleasant to experience it.

I use the word "concept" very specifically here; this is definitely an experimental book, but with one very specific experiment driving it. I hesitate to call it a gimmick, but it is definitely a one-trick premise. I will divulge it here:

Springer suffers writer’s blocked up until about the last tenth of the book. At that point he begins outlining and writing all in a rush the very book we are reading. This explains the clipped style. At one point, the life he is leading catches up to the story so he doesn’t know how to end it. So he waits until a few more things happen and then adds it in. Or, it’s not clear, he makes up the ending because it didn’t happen yet. The ending does come across as incredibly wish-fulfilling for an alcoholic womanizer…Jessica finally sleeps with him again and after not being able to make her orgasm through many previous experiences, he finally gets her to come 9 times in one encounter. Humph. Call me skeptical, but it seems like Springer just wrote his own fantasy ending to his sexual failure. Either that…or Markson wrote a fantasy ending because he thought of the story as light-hearted comedy so he gave Springer a “happy ending” so to speak.

If you are new to Markson, I recommend going elsewhere to truly appreciate him. And he is great. I recommend again: The Last Novel and [b:Wittgenstein's Mistress|51506|Wittgenstein’s Mistress|David Markson|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347696167s/51506.jpg|1278359] But a better title for Springer’s Progress would be Markson’s Backsliding. ( )

This novel was published in 1977. It is perhaps self-indulgent. The author uses a mannered style, with big words and an unusual number of contractions. Pretty much everything that can be contracted is. So the end of the previous sentence would be "contracted's". That slows down the reading so the reader gets more involved in the plot. The plot is a 47-year-old writer with a decent marriage gets involved in an affair with a younger woman. He is extremely self-indulgent, lives off his wife, spends every night in a bar drinking & having one-night stands, and then he falls in love with this younger woman. It is hard to see what she sees in him, he has lots of words and he is a published writer, so maybe that is it. He seemed like the person who is attractive but who everybody involved with would be better off not involved with.