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Title: Not even sad, just pathetic
Review: In an interview published in an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction half-devoted to his work, David Markson explained the decade-long gaps in his oeuvre as "sheer barnyard laziness". That phrase came to haunt me as I whizzed through this shallow montage of high-culture trivia. (Typical paragraph, quoted in its entirety: "Richard Wagner was an anti-Semite." Got that?) I can't conceive of a lazier way to manufacture a book than Markson has come up with here. The impression is of a tired old scribbler (the author has been collecting Social Security for a while now) who still needs to think of himself as an artist, even though what little of the Divine Flame he once tended (his major effort was a pretentious melange of recycled Malcolm Lowry called "Going Down") sputtered out decades ago.
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