Tripticks

by Ann Quin

Ann Quin's Tripticks offers a scattered account of the narrator's flight across a surreal American landscape, pursued by his "No. 1 X-wife" and her new lover. This masterpiece of pre-punk aesthetics critiques the hypocrisy and consumerism of modern culture while spoofing the "typical" maladjusted family, which in this case includes a father who made his money in ballpoint pens and a mother whose life revolves around her overpampered, all-demanding poodle. Stylistically, this is Quin's most daring work, prefiguring the formal inventiveness of Kathy Acker.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, British Literature, 20th Century, Novels, Classics

Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Ann Quin (1936-1973) was a British writer noted for her experimental style. The author of Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972), she committed suicide in 1973 at the age of 37.

Quin came from a working-class family and was educated at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament. She trained as a shorthand typist and worked in a solicitor's office, then at a publishing company when she moved to Soho and began writing novels.

Despite a complete re-print of her works by the Dalkey Archive Press, Quin's work has yet to see the critical attention many people claim it deserves.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first time I have read anything by Ann Quin: she was a British experimental artist who took her own life in 1973 following years of mental ill-health. She wrote four novels and this was the last and most experimental. She was part of a very loose group of experimental writers including B S Johnson, Eva Figes, Alan Burns and Rayner Heppenstall.
She is not much read today but she has influenced many other writers, including Kathy Acker, Juliet Jacques, Stewart Home, Deborah Levy and Chloe Aridjis.
The plot is very loose and the narrator is male with three ex-wives. He is taking a sort of road trip across the US. He keeps coming across his ex-wives in all sorts of locations: usually his first ex-wife and she crops up most often. Various older family members also pop up in odd places and there are epistolary episodes as well. This has been compared to Burroughs and Quinn’s landscape is just as surreal. If you didn’t know the date you could easily date it by the references to fashion, TV, by the language and attitudes to sex and sexuality. The account is rather scattered and broken, jumping around a great deal. When a phrase like pre-punk aesthetics is applied to a work you pretty much know what you are going to get! It certainly wasn’t liked by the critics, look at what the TLS had to say:
“The technique, which must be even more laborious to employ than it is to interpret, cannot perform what it aims at. The thing is still physically a book, we must still turn over its pages, we still have to remember from one page to the next what has accumulated. The effort of doing so through the thickets of frustration that the method and layout interpose is too much, and draws fatal attention to the powerful underlying humourlessness of the whole thing”
However there are other views:
"a savage assault on an America obsessed by commerce, advertising and media, a road novel from hell, written as if it is the frenzy of one last gasp"
Of course it is a road novel of sorts and a pursuit narrative, but in some ways these aspects are almost asides to the encounters with various aspects of early 1970s American culture. There is also a good deal of free association and stream of consciousness digressions. This isn’t light bedtime reading, it is quite hard work. The more perceptive will also notice the influence of Marcuse. Quinn expects a lot of the reader, but she was the same in real life as her friend Alan Burns recalls a public literary meeting:
“she did her Quin thing, that is to say she came onto the stage and she just sat and looked at people, she wouldn’t say a goddamn word! She just stared, she either implied or she actually stated that … we can communicate more in silence than with someone actually putting the words across.”
Quin chops things about pop-art style and there are lots of illustrations from Carol Annand. You get the words of Nixon or Johnson juxtaposed with ads for erotic underwear or inserted into family history as in this instance where the narrator is talking to an ex father-in-law:
‘He was all for reconciliations, and while slicing through a neatly tiered 3-layer cake – more like a marble cake full of unexpected whorls and inseparable blendings – he exclaimed: “I do not think that those men who are out there fighting for us tonight think we should enjoy the luxury of fighting each other back home.”’
The quote at the end is from a TV broadcast by Johnson in 1966.
I can’t say that I was passionate about this and I think I would enjoy her first novel Berg more, but it is memorable and I know people on here who would love it. It is an acquired taste.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anne Quin had previously reminded me of European avant-garde writers such as Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet being entwined with Virginia Woolf , but here, in her final novel, a year before she walked into the sea never to walk out, she takes an even more radical and daring approach with a chaotic postmodern feminist anti-road novel that mocks things like 60s drug culture, machismo, consumerism, religious sanctimony and self-help claptrap. Clearly her most Americanized work, which has strong vibes pointing towards the Beat movement - I could see flashes of Ginsberg, fellow poet Gregory Corso as well as W.S. Burroughs - I found it an hilarious, grotesque, sex-crazed, manic and surreal journey that never takes its foot off the gas for a breather. In Their Buicks and Chevrolets, whether the nameless narrator is pursuing his No. 1 X-wife and her schoolboy gigolo lover or they are pursuing him is not really clear, as they drive back and forth across a strange America. But none of this matters in terms of a story, as it's all about the landscape of Quin's language. You read this for the writing not for any plot. There were some passages here that simply blew me away. Accompanying the narrator's voice are cartoonish drawings by the artist Carol Annand, while the middle section is made up of letters from the narrator's parents, in-laws, and lovers. Tripticks was quite the ride.

[Nate D · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you come filled with dreams, it may happen that your dream changes about every 15 minutes. The most is yet to come.

This would have been the perfect road-trip reading, had I known about it one month ago. As it is, this indeterminate landscape of exercise crazes, seedy motels, and Joshua-tree ringed hot springs is all too familiar. And though we never made it to Phoenix, I feel like Robert Altman was aiming at the same America seen here when he made O.C. and Stiggs.

Something I read had lead me to believe Ann Quin would be super-dry avant-garde opacity. In fact, her final novel is hysterical, a certainly experimental but dagger-witted rampage across an America burning with sex, consumerist bloat, and roadside attractions, deftly rendered in lists, statistics, and various cut-up interruptions derived from advertising, pulp blurbs, and brochures. These interruptions, which often occur mid-paragraph and with no warning besides a sudden disappearance of the first-person 'I', can make this a little confused at times I suppose (rumors about difficulty), and tends to garble the elegance of the prose a bit (none of these extra-story sources possessing Quin's own command of language, of course) but the technique really works. How better to present a universe being systematically brainwashed by television and 70s search-for-self culture. It takes a little adjustment, but once you get it, it really works, becoming more fun and readable than alternate dystopian road-novel Flet, for instance, and I liked Flet. It certainly seems more tightly directed than the Burroughsian cut-ups of Naked Lunch.

Eerie rites greet the morning sun. He kneels on the floor grasping a small wheel with both hands and slowly prostrates himself. On a roof not far away someone runs on a treadmill. The president of a dressmaking company puts on a belt that sends electric shocks to his abdomen, while his wife stands with one foot on a four-wheeled board and the other foot on another four-wheeled board reverently squatting and rising, while their daughter lies head down on a slanted board, jerking convulsively at the waist. Sauna belts to sweat into. Executive Barbells to swing. Tensolators for building up muscles; vibrator massage machines ('both centrifugal and percussive action') and roller massage machines ('for deep-penetrating massage') treadmills and rocks and vibrating belts and electric bicycles ('Do your story dictation aboard a Trimcycle'). Tone-O-Matic weighted belts - belts weighted with 10 pounds of lead and intended to be worn in the normal course of a day's activity. One man cried that his hands were getting bigger and bigger.

The actual plot is pretty simple: our protagonist and apparent embodiment of his times is on the run from his No.1 X-wife, their paths crisscrossing so that they often end up at the same motels, where our (anti)hero can peer through the keyhole at X and new lover doing naked yoga together or whatever (he's jealous that she never did naked yoga with him of course). In the process, various pulp-inflected scenarios play out and the protagonist mulls over his three failed marriages, jumping in time and through a long epistolary section (perhaps he has brought his letters with him in order to re-read. Again, it's a little garbled and uneven at times, but it seems true-to-subject and a perhaps natural result of reminiscing and channel surfing at the same time).

The book is also notably interspersed with images seeming traced from collaged ephemera of the times: advertising circulars, noir scenes, sex, superheroes, random details of faces and objects. These come as rythmic interuptions that pace out the action, mirroring motifs and themes without ever actually illustrating. The technique works, I think, another sub-hum of the major information hum continuously barraging the story.

Anyway. This was great, and I'm totally excited to read more Quin. A shame this was the last thing she wrote before swimming out into the ocean and disappearing at age 37.

[knig · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book’s life force codes on a frequency which fuses with mine, starts a chain reaction of rhythm and call, beat sync , pulse syntax broken line semi arid consistency of bio-metrics: mine and Quin’s, the consistency a kind of grace, tamed by levees of initiating articulation that coheres.

Quin can write her own review, because I can’t. I’m dwarfed at the foot of a colossus, my syntax scrambled. Everything here, belongs to her.

The narrator is revvying through rural America, pursued by one (or all three of) his ex wife and her new lover. (Perhaps only in his mind). Recollections follow thus:

For six months he shared his wife and a nubile young girl. ‘Its a certain rhythm, a nervous montage. Trips not established trails, a series of spectacular switchbacks. Domes and carvings, arches and flying buttresses. I stretched out along a floor of inland seas. Their bodies merged into a river flowing upside down. Afternoon skin became bronze red, gold purple. Scenic narrow winding mountains. Forest areas composed mostly of slightly rolling terrain. Leg on leg, arm on leg, leg on arm’

In the spirit of sharing he also has a go with his mother in law in her car. Ever since that night, ‘there is an impressive budda-deh-buddedeh in the rear axle, and a scintillating ‘chatcheteh-chatch-eteh comes from the rear shock absorber. There’s a soothing tokerah, toketah from the radio antennae and a tosshhhzbed from the radio’.

And when there is not enough ‘community consciousness’ for sharing, he rapes, where ‘to reach her meant a dug well with a stone casing built at ground level, while I lowered myself by means of jackscrews, inch by inch’.

Marriages end with rows which are ‘sections of reconstructed tracks with wooden rails pegged to stone sleepers’.

A new marriage begins as he gazes at his intended in her ‘patent leather and high tongued cranberry boots, as she contorted her torso and articulate hips into a restless kaleidoscope. Starting a chain reaction with double doses of gold toned hardware on the buckled vamp’.

..............

Ann Quin writes like a man. She carves up words brutally and wrings out every last drop of sentiment from them. She stockpiles numbers: they accrete in autistic code, along with caustic compound world lists. Her sentence strings reverberate with a canon of construct which separates elements so as to put them in isolation and relief.

Just too bad that unable to overcome her mental illness, she jumped off the Brighton pier.

[MJ Nicholls]

No. Not at the moment. No thanks. I read B.S. Johnson’s corpus. I read Gilbert Sorrentino’s corpus. I read choice cuts from the butcher’s slab of postmodernism. I have limits. I cannot read this surrealistic cut-up who-the-fuck-is-narrating-this parade of amusing but aimless and tiresome non sequiturs for more than forty pages. I don’t care how cool it sounds. Or if the novel is a masterpiece of “pre-punk aesthetics” that helped out Kathy Acker. Or if there are groovy illustrations. Not at the moment. No. Freaking. Thanks. I have a several hundred orphanages of unloved strange fiction to read. I can’t love them all. I am not Mother Theresa. For one, I don’t think contraception is the Devil’s Business. Second, my middle name is not Gonxha. Call me a wet fish. But that’s the lowdown. I cannot commit right now. I am sure I will marry at some point and speedily divorce, leaving my X-wives strewn across American highways and a semi-drowned poodle in tow. But not now. These paragraphs with their lists and sentence fragments and surreal (don’t you cringe at that word?) imagery do not have a place in my literary purview. No. P.S. I once recommended Aberration of Starlight to Knig-o-lass to growls of disapproval. This is her revenge. Thanks. I’ll return this one by express mail.

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comparing authors to other authors is both a natural and a dangerous thing, natural because (some) people like to read and draw connections between things, dangerous because that's insanely reductive, especially when you're going to compare a female author to a male one, since female authors have been reduced in our society to either writers of YA dystopia or romance writers. And yes, there are counterexamples, women writers who have gotten out of this particular ghetto, but who's the general public more likely to know about? Marilynne Robinson or Stephanie Meyer? Clarice Lispector or Danielle Steele? The point being, everyone's all "Burroughs Burroughs Burroughs" with this book because it's all cut-up, and yeah okay I detected a Burroughs influence too, but look: while I can't deny the lacerations Naked Lunch made on my 21-year-old soul, I like Tripticks more than Naked Lunch (to say nothing of other Burroughs... I mean, the self-repeating Nova Trilogy? The parlor trick Dead Fingers Talk? Tripticks all the way). And Berg. Maybe more than Quin's other two novels, too, but I'd like to actually read those two before I bandy this about as the peak of Quin's career.

Here's what you need to know about Tripticks: a man who has had three wives is fleeing his first, who pursues him with her Satanist hippie boyfriend. He, like Berg, has a weird Oedipal thing so overblown and comical that I have to take it as a parody of weird Oedipal things (Alexander Portnoy can go jump in a lake) that also extends to the family of the first ex-wife. None of these characters are ever named. Throughout the novel, suburbia and consumerism and the American Dream are skewered alongside Freudian analysis (which seems to be the only mode of psychology literary critics will acknowledge, but that's a rant for another day), pictures are interwoven with the text, bizarre sexual fantasies play out, scenes are cut to and from without warning, personal correspondence is read from, conventions of the thriller are bashed to pieces, and the line between fantasy and reality is blurred as paranoia and entropy increase. If this seems like the ingredients of an avant-garde classic - Gravity's Rainbow, say, or Naked Lunch - that's because this would be marked as such if this had been written by a man. I'm convinced of it. I am utterly and completely unwavering in my belief that Ann Quin's gender is the only reason why she remains largely forgotten today.

I mean, this book now has 40 ratings. Forty. And it's everything a fan of avant-garde literature could possibly want: laden with surreal humor, paranoid as fuck, chronologically jumbled, and yet still, in possession of a narrative, albeit a distorted one whose actual reality is difficult if not entirely impossible to discern. Yet, despite this, Quin's work has been buried. She has no role in the discourse, no place in literary history beyond a footnote consisting of "oh yeah, and Berg. Berg was fucked up." Well, guess what, literary world? You blew it, this is inspired madness. This is, in places, a satire of the complacent suburbs and in other places a satire of a satire of the complacent suburbs, not to mention the blows Quin strikes against misogyny via her narrator's boundless sexual appetite and lack of any accountability. All magnificently contorted onto itself in a weirdo mobius strip.

Read it, basically.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much of its time (the "swinging" 60s/70s) Quin utilises the cutup technique popularised by Burroughs, often to comic effect

Although there's not much of a coherent plot, my favourite section is the epistolary one which was quite funny.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

In which Quin reviews herself:

"The talk quick, sharp, clever, a dazzling display of brilliance which indeed was remarkable, and enormously pleasurable; but it left me numb, as though I had been spayed. I was unable to respond; a desperate competitiveness around me what could I say that would justify an interruption to all the verbal glory? Finally it was all simply too diffuse. I could understand if I were made to feel it...An attempt explicit, ardent, heroic perhaps, though at best only half successful-to perform the most necessary task: to connect the past with the future." (175-6)

I feel that if I had read this at a different time, I would have appreciated it more. Like after some long conventional novel.

Some of the language is fantastic, but the writing proceeds in such a manic, fractured propulsion that it almost reads as a long string of non-sequiturs. But that's not fair. There's certainly a focus, perhaps even a nucleus as the epistolary section reveals. And there's another level of meaning that emerges from the female author writing the male central "anti-protagonist" perspective so well.

You don't need to be a thrice divorced hippie to work here, but it helps.

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely WILD and I loved it!! Very clearly a huge influence on weirdo post-modern punk lit like Kathy Acker's Blood & Guts In High School with the way it employs illustrations and lists and sudden shifts in form (there's a whole section of 40 pages that are made up of letters from various characters to the protagonist). Really piercing, caustically funny attack on American values and consumerism that, more than any previous Ann Quin book, feels of a piece and consistently great from beginning to end. In its own way it's her most narrative-driven book but the narrative is totally surreal and askew and chaotic, like Quin's mind is going in seven directions at once and she (somehow) found a way to communicate all these conflicting thoughts on the page. Her most freaky, unhinged novel and definitely her best. :,)

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fun apparently hand-typed illustrated experiment in cultural satire or parody. I felt pretty misled by the descriptions I read beforehand. At its core it seemed to me a Brit's response to the cultural avalanche of Americana of the late sixties. It's not at all the anti road movie or paste up of advertising copy I was led to believe it was, more a free-association text careening through American imagery, macho film tropes, yes some advertising, but mostly cultural themes mainly relating to the family--both marriage, divorce and exes, as well as the then famous generation gap, stereotypical gender and familial roles (again perhaps from film, TV, and even U.S. literature) and how Brits might have seen Americaness through our movies, TV, and worldwide advertising campaigns.

It was funny, often canny, and despite the freeflowing association of textual and visual satire with no real plot, engaging. It was also kind of fascinating in the way this female author spoofed the typical male first person macho narrator, and how she let her Englishness dominate linguistically even as she pretended to be writing in an American's voice. Far from jarring or a botched attempt at realism, it struck me as a fun subtext beneath the pastiche of cultural references, as if we knew all along anyway that there was a British woman inside this text pretending to be the testament of an American male.

Fun stuff--I'm now interested in seeking out Ms. Quin's other novels, said to be wholly different than this. Perhaps inundated with American cultural detritus, she just had to vomit it all back up in this wild long free association of American idiocies. Totally valid. (There's a reason why I live far away from the country of my birth, I suppose, and one of them is probably at least partially to avoid the behemoth of our cultural cliches and the incessant buzz of our corporate advertising culture--which includes most films and TV which are, let's face it, there solely to sell people shit.)

One last note: the best section of the novel, I thought, were the letters from all of the protagonist's wives, lovers, and parents in the middle section. It was both a fun satire of the epistolary novel form as well as the cultural cliches of American divorce, family relations, and the post-hippie post-pill sexual revolution.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps it’s a lesson I’m doomed to learn over and over: I just don’t like cut-ups. And so it’s on me that I picked this one off the shelf without really doing too much reading other than knowing that I wanted to read something by Ann Quin after having read Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout-19 last year which heavily references and nods to Quin as an influence on the protagonist, who is basically a stand-in for Bennett herself. Anyway, I wanted to read Berg but when I was in Portland last month, they had Tripticks on the shelf, and so I made my selection on such a whim.

In my experience with cut-up style novels, it feels like a game of literary Mad Libs, and there’s just a lot of boredom for me. I imagine for the person writing it, it’s a delight at every turn as new turns of phrase and unexpected danglers get modified by some unsuspecting thread of text, but to read it is to read a concatenation of lines chewed up and spliced together. Aside from the occasional chortle or snort or cracked smile, novels written in the cut-up style feel empty, void of feeling, meaning, character, idea, void of depth. The style seems like a great launchpad for creative endeavor; something to inspire some wicked pun or juxtapositional nuance lurking on the boundaries of our linguistic echelons, just out of reach save for a chance encounter of mashing to threads of text together. And so what happens in these novels is there’s repetitions and hiccups and a kind of shattered fragmentary quality that never adds up to anything beyond the sum of its parts. Basically, if you like funny sentences for 200 pages, then fair enough, but it just feels like an experiment to unlock creativity for the writer, rather than the creation of a writer.

Maybe I’m being harsh on cut-ups. I just have never read one and thought, “wow, what a provocative and intellectually stimulating affair,” instead, I feel bored and cross-eyed from layer after layer of non-sense.

Like I said, there are moments in cut-ups, and in Tripticks where things kind of conglomerate somehow, but those moments are quickly dashed as the cut-up form devolves the sentence, paragraph, thought into a web of words strung together by chance and a selective hand. I’d love to give Quin’s other novels a try, though, as I understand they are not at all like this one. And maybe I’ll be a little wiser before I try to pick up another novel in the cut-up style.

Perhaps a seminal piece when it debuted, especially under the framework of a satirical perversion of the seriousness of novels like On the Road, sadly, Tripticks offered little for me to like.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not the type of book, I suppose, that someone should read for entertainment. Then, though, I wonder what one should read it for. It is incredibly dizzying in its use of language, and the form is bizarre. This can be read as "this is a difficult book to read", but it also goes well with feelingsof paranoia, alienation from the self and various other things that modern American life seems to create for its inhabitants. So often, I was not sure where the tangent the story had gone on was actually at, but it didn't distract from the droning, isolating central theme of people out of control because they're oversexed, bored, and otherwise unable to do anything useful in the world they live in.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶]

This was probably pretty noteworthy when it first appeared in 1972 but it failed to excite me in 2015. The near-nonexistent narrative and the jumpy prose used to spin it out left me bored and confused. I did find the epistolary interlude at the midpoint to be helpful in adding weight to the narrative and this section was the most enjoyable to read, but still only tentatively so. Had there been a little more narrative and had the prose occasionally stood still for more than a nanosecond, I might have been right there with Quin. The critiques of post-WWII American culture were no doubt razor-sharp at the time but no longer seem so bold after this long. If anything they are merely a reminder of how little has altered in our course toward a numbed oblivion.

[David Peak · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Ann Quin's masterpiece.

[Mayk Can Şişman · Rating 1 out of 5]

boğucu deneyselliğine en fazla 30 sayfa tahammül edebildim. sorinatsori.

[Will]

I'm honestly surprised that I made it through this novel. It's an incredibly opaque ramble. And while there were passages that grabbed me, and I appreciate the mixed media and subversion, the whole experience felt like a not-so-pleasant challenge.

I like Quin's writing. It's replete with dry observations on the banality of American consumerism and chauvinism. At its most accessible, certain passages remind me of lyrics from Dry Cleaning songs. And sometimes it's satisfyingly weird ("I thought in terms of cartoons, each frame changing. I wore bold-textured high-riding slipons and appeared to others all mood and pauses and long stretches of languor.” 44.). I also like its inherent critique of "On the Road," which Quin separately described as "a lot of sentimental rubbish and [] tedious [in] how it goes on and on in this phoney pseudo ‘isn’t life crazy but it’s life man’ sort of fashion."

But spread across 192 pages, the writing and its message wane. There isn't a clear narrative. Perhaps that's the point; but it also makes the reader less invested in the novel. In its middle third, it pivots into a series of letters to the protagonist (an unnamed man) from his mother, father, ex-wife, and lover. Because of the relative accessibility of that section, I enjoyed it the most. I honestly can't really recall, or at least easily describe, the rest of the book.

"Tripticks" feels dated. The version I read is in Courier New--a font I associate with the 1960s and old fogey counter-culture. There are doodles mixed throughout the novel that reinforce that feeling. (Interestingly, the illustrations were added after the book was accepted for publication, and thus are kind of squeezed into the existing layout). Another reviewer commented that the book was "probably pretty noteworthy" when it was published, but not so much now, which felt right to me.

For a parting positive note--the book reminded me of another book that I enjoyed more, but never finished: Ducks, Newburyport. Both are stream-of-conscious and somewhat opaque. Ducks is certainly longer--thus, I never finished it. But, perhaps it's time I picked it back up . . .

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

ya gotta love novels with poodles (right? you do?) this is a fairly hardbitten look at conspicuous consumption, of things, lovers, family. and jet setting too. i didn't know the author was gone now. too bad, really.

[james !! · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’m running out of great things to say about Ann Quin. just simply a fantastic writer!! this is my 4th & final book i’ve read of hers and i have loved every moment!! to see the progression of her writing from ‘berg’ has been staggering. with such a unique style brings such a unique challenge to all of her works, but ‘tripticks’ stands proudly as an outlier to the rest of her books. far more americanised, far more absurd & chopped up (somehow even harder to follow than ‘passages’!) this book is a marvellous journey through many different facades that just keep getting more ridiculous as you read. i’m surprised at just how funny the text gets whilst juggling with so many topics. pretty much impossible to sum up as i feel i’d do it disservice. gutted to of reached the end of Quin’s finished books as she’s become a stonewall favourite author of mine!

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ann Quin's last book is an unexpected blast, an extreme but often deliberately ridiculous sex & violence American road trip. Alternately resembles Quin's absurdist monologue style put through Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition mincer, one of those sex & technology Richard Hamilton paintings rendered as a novel, lost scenes from The Man Who Fell to Earth, and an extended parody of Kerouac and Burroughs. Not a masterpiece like Berg or Three, it's nonetheless lots of fun - but don't expect to be able to follow much of it.

[Victoria Gillespie · Rating 5 out of 5]

strange but great. loved the stream of consciousness & concoction of different forms (lists, cartoons, letters,…). felt like reading a collage.

[Mara · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A lurid vision of hell on earth" -p.134

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 3 out of 5]

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

[Kristal · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was difficult for me in the same way Burroughs is difficult for me- I’m not good at following the chaotic dada stream of consciousness. If you’re into that, this would probably be a treat!

[Matilda · Rating 4 out of 5]

o gee ok i really understand why others have said you don’t read this for the plot you read it for the form. i was SO intrigued by this book when i heard that it won an award for best writing written on drugs ( the drug here being birth control , loved that sm ) i really loved the satire here and the poke at american consumerism and masculine egos and the absurdity of the sex-charged 60s/70s and the road trip americana trope . the little illustrations on the margins did it for me too.

so much of how this is told all chaotic and choppy and jumping from one thing to the next in what feels like an exasperated breath just felt right to the nameless big ego man and the letters were funny and it just felt playful and experimental and honestly i was in the mood for it

will i re read? nope but i really really liked this for what it is and what it was trying to do and what it did

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great work by Quin. This one is far more political and avant garde than her other works. It doesn't speak to me as much as Passages or Berg (though moreso than Three) but it is still excellent. It is ahead of its time in that it speaks heavily on actual feminism (not the weird pro-capitalist feminism that's present in a lot of contemporary literature) and class struggles in her modern world. It's one I'll have to read again to fully grasp, but it's very worth reading even if it doesn't make much sense on an initial read through.

[Saskia Blake]

jm so confused !!!!

[Jack Alexander Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

In August of 1974, the same month of his resignation, David Bowie was already asking "Do you remember your President Nixon?".

Also in '74, Gravity's Rainbow, a book about, among other things, the complexity of history literally disintegrating its protagonist, all but won the Pulitzer prize.

It's safe to say that by the 70s there was a distinct thread of thought within post-modern art that detailed how the unrelenting pace of industrialised production of media and culture had displaced us from reliable conceptions of time.

That, instead of providing stability, our conscious awareness of being within the context of an increasingly complex and accelerating history had the effect of turning us into palimpests, blank slates unable to place ourselves in a story we could make sense of.

I think you could convincingly argue that one of Quin's chief concerns in her all too brief output was this sense of dislocation from linear, digestible time that we use to make sense of our lives and the world around us. Across Three, Passages and Tripticks, she expands outward to detail how relationship dynamics, political turmoil and the all-devouring blackhole of mostly American media have all alienated us from being able to build anything coherent out of the information thrown at us.

Nearly 50 years later and in no small part thanks to the development of online communication, Quin's astute assessment has now become the air we breathe. Not only does life on the internet provide a density of information previously unrealised, but time spent on it is completely out of joint and disassociated from linearity. We are bombarded with a deluge of overwhelming, yet completely hollow experiences and encounters - suffering the same fate as the protagonist at the end of the novel; hijacked by, and rendered as hosts for an entire apparatus of technology foisted on us.

Tripticks reads as an obituary, to both Quin, the central characters of the novel, and the culture as a whole. It's frequently hilarious, endlessly inventive and incredibly depressing. A post-modern road trip full of dreams, fantasies and micro-narratives, aware that it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In short, from her perspective, she knew she was doomed and walked into the sea, leaving us with a body of work that needs an order of magnitude more eyeballs on it than it currently has. Across 4 novels and 600 something pages in less than a decade, she did more with the form than most do across an entire lifetime.

[Geoffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

...sorry, but it just isn't enough. God knows I WISH Quin's final statement was some sort of transcendent masterwork, but it ain't happening. I love all kinds of avant-garde fiction, but it has to be, um, good. In spite of a few vaguely amusing moments, in the main this is just tedium personified, with a desperately self-conscious attempt at writing in a hip, "American" idiom.

[A.D. Jameson · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite novels.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

(british literature)
yet, (all-dressed consumerist hellscape version of america fiction)
experimental, hallucinatory, scattered fiction;melodrama you would expect in an eighties/nineties novel on late capitalism, to get lost in, to turn back on, to flick the page backward and forward to remember what, exactly, is going on—an act that mirrors the protagonist’s own interiority and quest.. these spheres—dreams, reality, memory—bleed together, lacking all of them the steadiness of verisimilitude. there is very little to remind you of what is what. the flimsiness of reality enhances the feeling that the protagonist lacks control; that he does not have the physical solidity in his life to define it for himself. in a world that seems overwhelming and overdetermined, how do you get closer to yourself?

‘With life being as loud, hyper saturated, and cloying as it is, there isn’t much space to marshall desperately the bits of body, bile, memory, and spirit, the cute things about you—to tie them together and call them the self. Even when you have found the quote-unquote peace and quiet to reflect on who you are and what you want, life, being ordained (spiritually, cosmically, psychologically, algorithmically, whatever) can make this work feel futile.'

definitely my less favorite from other of her opuses.