David Markson, Fred Exley

I missed the book-review volleying that will have taken place relating to David Markson’s private-eye novel, EPITAPH FOR A TRAMP. Many wags have tried to write “the world’s longest haiku” and I think of them when I imagine that Markson was trying to write the coolest character in all of literature. The tribe of persons who (freely) allow themselves the intoxicating delusion that Greenwich Village in the late 1950s was the innermost chamber of the heart of cool will doubtless have read the book wondering if Markson was writing a detective novel to garner some of the cash that is falsely called ‘quick,’ or if he was writing the true book, his Gatsby; the secret sharer, the purloined letter.
I don’t recall reading a book (coffee, a sandwich, it’s raining all month in Ithaca, New York this year) with such sun-beating presence of auctorus; you and I spy through the costume parade, and no one is ever out of character, Chaucer is the neediest pilgrim, who, in Canterbury, regretted, celebrated, and swam with the beguiled.
Buoyed in restless seas, treading between the emperor’s new clothes and "le musée sans murs."
Harry Fannin: Bartleby drinking champagne.

Oh, it was a real castle!

David Markson SPRINGER'S PROGRESS

It would have been useful, thought some of the crafters of stone circles not far from Loudeac, in Brittany, if Pi were exactly 3, instead of the cumbersome 3.14 insisted upon by more pragmatic Celts. So these adventurers tried to make circles that were perfectly round, yet with a Pi of 3. Some of these imperfect perfect circles remain.
Markson's prose fictions have a Pi of 3, and among such wiggly coils of stones the reader who takes the author into his heart will have a merry afternoon.
Markson never perjures, never dupes; never tricks his reader. The novels repose before the reader and the reading sentiment like compleat anglers, perfect jewels of typewritten manuscripts, unmediated, authentic prose. There will be delicious potato salad with relish, lush green grapes; turkey sandwiches, vodka and lemonade, luscious crisps, pagan discussion, naps, much tongueful kissing, and dreamy vistas of the golden glowing sylvan horizon. Context is everything. We are safe here. Lucien has gathered breath from the books he's read, and hears the trumbling course of his veinblood purr within his memory, a willing victim of the fairs, every glass is in its place in this bar, motes in the slanting sunbeams ring, singing out his faith, the true calling of Lucien reciting aloud, declaiming lyrics from the book that was written before he put pen to paper, and had he worked straight through, there's springer sauntering through the wilderness of this world, beasts and bugs tamed by the melody of prose made by Markson.

There's a fish in the percolator

David Foster Wallace (b. Ith, incidentally) understood Markson's book well.
As do those who achieve book-epiphany with their first howl of merry mirth.
Or perhaps that is a peal.
One ripples and knows currents of bubbles just below the surface of the water.
Ulysses' dog features in Wittgenstein's Mistress.

So I think of David Lynch.
Particularly Twin Peaks.