This is Not a Novel is a novel like no other, with the possible exception of the author’s own Reader’s Block, which Anne Beattie hailed as a work of genius. . This is Not a Novel is a highly inventive work that drifts genre-less somewhere in between fiction, nonfiction, and psychological memoir. In the opening pages a narrator, called only Writer, announces that he is weary unto death of making up stories, not to mention inventing character sand contemplating plot, setting, theme. Yet the writer is determined to seduce the reader into turning pages-and to get somewhere,
nonetheless. What follows are pages crammed with astonishingly fascinating literary and artistic anecdotes, quotations, and cultural curiosities. All this is leavened with Markson’s deliciously ironic wit and laughter, so that when the writer does indeed finally get us somewhere, it’s the journey that has mattered, not the arrival.