The first novel
Ah, how one's mature style is presaged in one's early works, even if in unclear wise!
You know how hot the nights can get in New York in August, when everybody suffers—like the vagrants in the doorways along Third Avenue without any ice for their muscatel? Or all the needy, underprivileged call girls with no fresh-air fund to get them away from the city streets for the summer?
I'd taken a cold shower at one o'clock. Since then I'd recited the line-ups of six out of the eight National League baseball teams from teh early thirties, I'd tried twice to make a mental list of every woman I'd ever known carnally, and now I was running through parts and nomenclature of common American hand weapons. I'd even had the light on and read for half an hour, but it was no good. It was still steaming. I was still awake. I was still thinking about her.
Pretty kickass. The opening paragraphs of Markson, Epitaph for a Tramp, just picked up in a used bookstore, since I thought they might have Wittgenstein's Mistress or one of the first two of his last three novels. Compare a few consecutive bits from the only other thing by him I've read, The Last Novel:
E.M. Forster's astonishment at learning that telephone wires were not hollow.
Old enough to remember when any number of people seemed to believe something similar—or at least felt it necessary to shout, when confronted with long distance.
Five or six lunatics, the contributors to the first Impressionist exhibition were called by Le Figaro.
Heine read Plutarch's Lives for the first time when quite young.
And said it made whim wish to leap onto a stallion and ride off to conquer France.William Blake's emphatically avowed lack of interest in sex.
Actually, if entered into in the proper spirit, one probably could make a decent case for stylistic continuity (where decency would, of course, be a decency relative to the proper spirit). (The back of the crime novel is careful to explain that Markson only wrote such things, before turning to serious writing (so called), to make money. Well, whatever.)
Comments
on 2007-12-04 12:32:44.0, Belle Lettre commented:
Damn, yet more books I have to read.
and, further, on 2007-12-04 8:18:44.0, ben wolfson commented:
That depends on how insecure you are and how likely you think reading certain books is to raise you in someone's esteem.