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The Solitary Twin
Harry Mathews’s last novel is one of his most accessible—and perhaps one of his best
Harry Mathews's brilliant final work, The Solitary Twin, is an engaging mystery that simultaneously considers the art of storytelling. When identical twins arrive at an unnamed fishing port, they become the focus of the residents' attention and gossip. The stories they tell about the young men uncover a dizzying web of connections, revealing passion, sex, and murder. Fates are surprisingly intertwined, and the result is a moving, often hilarious, novel that questions our assumptions about life and literature.
Harry Mathews's brilliant final work, The Solitary Twin, is an engaging mystery that simultaneously considers the art of storytelling. When identical twins arrive at an unnamed fishing port, they become the focus of the residents' attention and gossip. The stories they tell about the young men uncover a dizzying web of connections, revealing passion, sex, and murder. Fates are surprisingly intertwined, and the result is a moving, often hilarious, novel that questions our assumptions about life and literature.
106 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 2, 2017
10 people are currently reading
279 people want to read
About the author
Harry Mathews
67 books82 followersHarry Mathews was an American author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays.
Together with John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, Mathews founded and edited the short-lived but influential literary journal Locus Solus (named after a novel by Raymond Roussel, one of Mathews's chief early influences) from 1961 to 1962.
Harry Mathews was the first American chosen for membership in the French literary society known as the Oulipo, which is dedicated to exploring new possibilities in literature, in particular through the use of various constraints and algorithms. The late French writer Georges Perec, likewise a member, was a good friend, and the two translated some of each other's writings. Mathews considers many of his works to be Oulipian in nature, but even before he encountered the society he was working in a parallel direction.
Mathews was married to the writer Marie Chaix and divided his time between Paris, Key West, and New York.
Together with John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, Mathews founded and edited the short-lived but influential literary journal Locus Solus (named after a novel by Raymond Roussel, one of Mathews's chief early influences) from 1961 to 1962.
Harry Mathews was the first American chosen for membership in the French literary society known as the Oulipo, which is dedicated to exploring new possibilities in literature, in particular through the use of various constraints and algorithms. The late French writer Georges Perec, likewise a member, was a good friend, and the two translated some of each other's writings. Mathews considers many of his works to be Oulipian in nature, but even before he encountered the society he was working in a parallel direction.
Mathews was married to the writer Marie Chaix and divided his time between Paris, Key West, and New York.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
June 6, 2021
The Solitary Twin is something like a postmodern noir but it also incorporates life stories told by the different characters so the novelette seems to be somewhat heterogeneous… Actually, it is a postmodernistic version of the famous Greek tragedy.
There are twin brothers… And there is some mystery about them…
Two persons – a male publisher and female behaviourist – become interested in their relationships and they wish to know their story… But twins refuse to talk about themselves…
Every one of us behaves according to one’s motives – both obvious and secret – and sometimes we are ready to do anything in order to hide our secret motives.
There are twin brothers… And there is some mystery about them…
John and Paul were also visitors to the town. They were twins, as identical as can be. They wore the same clothes, chino trousers and open-neck sweaters, in John’s case adorned with a faded maroon neckerchief… Each had taken lodgings in rather shabby boarding houses… Their intonation and accent afforded no key to their identities, although they said very different things. The only clues were John’s neckerchief and his occasional wearing of wire-rimmed reading glasses.
Their boarding houses lay far apart, at opposite sides of the town. John attended the Methodist church, Paul the Roman Catholic. They drank their pale ale at different bars. They were in fact never seen together and apparently avoided all commerce with one another. This puzzled but did not disturb the native inhabitants – “an odd story” was the general remark on their relationship, or the lack of one.
Two persons – a male publisher and female behaviourist – become interested in their relationships and they wish to know their story… But twins refuse to talk about themselves…
Paul and I have a sworn agreement not to discuss one another in public, certainly not in print. I suppose that right now I’m technically breaking my promise. But you are clearly good people, I hope we’ll become friends, the three of us. I feel that you deserve a few words of explanation. But very few.
“It was precisely because we knew how odd our behavior appeared to outsiders — all the more so in a community as small as this — that we came to our agreement. I think it’s worked rather well. Many people wonder; and most of them are discreet, they let us live our lives as we wish. We have friends enough, but I’d say we’re accepted with respect rather than affection.
Every one of us behaves according to one’s motives – both obvious and secret – and sometimes we are ready to do anything in order to hide our secret motives.
April 30, 2018
Identical twin brothers show up in a small fishing village, and hell breaks loose. Well, mostly due to the citizens of this town who are fascinated by the presence of these twins, and the commentary from separate characters, on the sexual and gossip side of these twins. It reminds me of a bit of Fassbinder's film "Katzelmacher," in that a character or stranger (immigrant) shows up and the entire community feels to comment on this presence in the town. It also deals with people's narrative, and this is the playful aspect of Harry Mathews' "The Solitary Twin." I sense there is a system or a game from this Oulipo writer, but I haven't figured that out. Nevertheless, a funny and enjoyable read. It doesn't read like an author's last book. Mathews had that sense of discovery and a spring attitude toward his works.
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June 22, 2024How to Read a Book Written with Hidden Constraints
This was treated to some surprisingly superficial reviews: The New York Times (June 15, 2018), The Brooklyn Rail (June 2018), The New York Times, The White Review. For some reason it seems to be enough to mention Mathews's interest in puzzles and games, and make brief references to his characters' interest in free will and identity. But surely the interest of a book like this is not its detective story narrative, with its clever solution, or its metafictional penchant for stories within stories. Mathews shares those interests with A Thousand and One Nights, and that's not a historically helpful parallel.
Mathews himself said, in effect, that puzzles are the point but puzzle-solving isn't. "The narrators are all trying to solve some riddle or mystery and are overcome by an obsessive conviction that they will be able to find a definitive answer, but it all falls apart." (Interview quoted in the The New York Times obituary, February 2, 2017.) He said the same thing in many other ways in an interview with Lynn Tillman in Bomb 26 (1988-89). Early in the interview he suggests they might even not be talking about his novels. "But, for instance, right now we're talking about a particular subject, and I seem to be communicating to you about that subject. By the end of this conversation you may notice that something has happened that has nothing to do with the subject."
If the pleasure of Mathews's brand of Oulipo is not solving puzzles, and if his books are not about some "big subject" like philosophy or politics (as he says in the same interview), then what is the reader's share? Mathews's brand can be described, I think, by two traits in particular: he worked using some of the most elaborate constraints of any Oulipo author (complex sets of rules, not complex products of simple rules, like omitting the letter "e"); and he kept his constraints secret. This second point is made in David Bellos's biography of Perec, and it's possible Mathews even kept his constraints secret from Perec, who translated two of Mathews's books. At any rate it is plausible to assume a reader of Mathews's books doesn't have access to his constraints. (Mathews wrote at least one essay on his methods in 1981, and translated it in 1986; it's in Warren Motte's Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. It's not about an individual text, and I'm not aware of any other explanations.)
Given that Oulipean constraints are understood, as Mathews says in his biographical essay on Perec, as "procedures and structures so peremptory in their demands that no one using them can avoid subordinating his personal predilections to them," the question is how to read knowing there are constraints in the text, but not knowing what they are. (In Grand Street 3 no. 1 (autumn 1983.) A reasonable starting point is to note that the pleasure of reading itself was one of his principal goals. This is how he puts it in a 1997 interview: "I treasure the innocence, the love of story-telling, surprises, and all the basic, childish pleasures that you have when you first come into contact with narrative... We may have ideas about what a work means or about the ways we should read it, but in the act of reading whatever happens happens and there is no way you can escape that.... One of the main attractions of the modernist approach for me is that in the modernist view only the surface of the work matters, and everything else appears only as a reflection upon that surface and is experienced as we move along it. The first writers who exploited this were, I think, Sterne in Tristram Shandy and [unexpectedly!] Byron in Don Juan." (Interview with Lytle Shaw, Chicago Review, 43 no. 2.) So what is "pleasure" when the text is distorted by constraints the reader doesn't know?
I'll take as an example the story one of the twins tells about his life. It's one of the novel'a stories-within-the-story. They are mainly uniform in length, about 5 pages each. That in itself might not have anything to do with constraints, but each story is so packed with unexpected details that it feels claustrophobic with constraints, as if Mathews wanted to squeeze the air out of conventional narrative. Paul begins by talking about his time in the Newell Academy, a place that plays a role in the plot later in the novel. It's the sort of introductory detail that readers of Conan Doyle and Agathe Christie will spot right away: an apparently trivial but actually consequential fact.
Then we learn what Paul studied there ("carpentry, masonry, basic engineering," mechanics, business). It's the sort of list where a reader will be wondering which subject propelled the speaker's later career—and in that sense, it isn't a trope of detective fiction, but of realism.
Paul catches the eye of a teacher named Ned Linnen. That will catch the eye of every reader, because we already know Paul went into fabric manufacture. So it's an alert—not the first one—that names are metafictional jokes.
Paul works as a bricklayer, then as an architect's assistant, and finally he sets up a business "selling textiles for architectural use." That could be a realist gesture, since the oddity of the job description might contribute to its reality effect: but it could also be a constraint, something like "combine architecture + fabric."
Next up there's a really odd litany of products and places, all in one short paragraph: he buys "a couple of hundred bales of Thai silk," then cuts them into abstract designs and sells them "to a retail bank in Ljubljana," then he makes "soothing" mauve curtains and carpets "for the waiting room of our clinic," and then he does some work in fashion, making "gauze djellebahs." To me, this sounds quintessentially Oulipean, the product of a list of a half-dozen constraints: "mention Thailand," "mention silk," and so on. It does not create a sense of greater realism: in fact it may cause a reader to scratch their head and wonder why they're being told these things. That uncertainty spills over into the metafictional when Paul's friends stop him to ask about the "soft kepi" caps they have seen around town.
The pleasure here is knowing there's a force field of constraints all around the narrative, and it's distorting what would have been a conventional story into something slightly surreal and absurd. (As Mathews says in his 1986 essay, constraints are for "tracking down the otherness hidden in language.") The late surrealism in Oulipo is generally harmless—you won't encounter trauma, like you might in Breton or Ernst, because the constraints are like rubber bumpers stopping the narrative from crashing. It's soothing to be pushed around gently by the constraints, and the sort of comfort Mathews is after requires an unusual number of deviations.
The deviations from convention aren't as thick as in Perec's A Void but they are denser than in his Life A User's Manual. The overall effect, for me, when it works, is a state of perpetual bemusement, where nothing makes too much sense. Violence and sex are defanged: there are moments of explicit sex and disgusting violence—like prying an onion out of a dead man's mouth, where it had been used as a gag—but they are softened by their affinity to the odd details that are distributed on every page.
Where the pleasure doesn't work, for me, are those places where I wish I did not know someone was watching out for me, guarding me against overly conventional, realist, romantic, or sentimental narratives, steering me to a world where I am reassured, several times a page, that not everything has deep meaning, and life is just full of little swerves.
This was treated to some surprisingly superficial reviews: The New York Times (June 15, 2018), The Brooklyn Rail (June 2018), The New York Times, The White Review. For some reason it seems to be enough to mention Mathews's interest in puzzles and games, and make brief references to his characters' interest in free will and identity. But surely the interest of a book like this is not its detective story narrative, with its clever solution, or its metafictional penchant for stories within stories. Mathews shares those interests with A Thousand and One Nights, and that's not a historically helpful parallel.
Mathews himself said, in effect, that puzzles are the point but puzzle-solving isn't. "The narrators are all trying to solve some riddle or mystery and are overcome by an obsessive conviction that they will be able to find a definitive answer, but it all falls apart." (Interview quoted in the The New York Times obituary, February 2, 2017.) He said the same thing in many other ways in an interview with Lynn Tillman in Bomb 26 (1988-89). Early in the interview he suggests they might even not be talking about his novels. "But, for instance, right now we're talking about a particular subject, and I seem to be communicating to you about that subject. By the end of this conversation you may notice that something has happened that has nothing to do with the subject."
If the pleasure of Mathews's brand of Oulipo is not solving puzzles, and if his books are not about some "big subject" like philosophy or politics (as he says in the same interview), then what is the reader's share? Mathews's brand can be described, I think, by two traits in particular: he worked using some of the most elaborate constraints of any Oulipo author (complex sets of rules, not complex products of simple rules, like omitting the letter "e"); and he kept his constraints secret. This second point is made in David Bellos's biography of Perec, and it's possible Mathews even kept his constraints secret from Perec, who translated two of Mathews's books. At any rate it is plausible to assume a reader of Mathews's books doesn't have access to his constraints. (Mathews wrote at least one essay on his methods in 1981, and translated it in 1986; it's in Warren Motte's Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. It's not about an individual text, and I'm not aware of any other explanations.)
Given that Oulipean constraints are understood, as Mathews says in his biographical essay on Perec, as "procedures and structures so peremptory in their demands that no one using them can avoid subordinating his personal predilections to them," the question is how to read knowing there are constraints in the text, but not knowing what they are. (In Grand Street 3 no. 1 (autumn 1983.) A reasonable starting point is to note that the pleasure of reading itself was one of his principal goals. This is how he puts it in a 1997 interview: "I treasure the innocence, the love of story-telling, surprises, and all the basic, childish pleasures that you have when you first come into contact with narrative... We may have ideas about what a work means or about the ways we should read it, but in the act of reading whatever happens happens and there is no way you can escape that.... One of the main attractions of the modernist approach for me is that in the modernist view only the surface of the work matters, and everything else appears only as a reflection upon that surface and is experienced as we move along it. The first writers who exploited this were, I think, Sterne in Tristram Shandy and [unexpectedly!] Byron in Don Juan." (Interview with Lytle Shaw, Chicago Review, 43 no. 2.) So what is "pleasure" when the text is distorted by constraints the reader doesn't know?
I'll take as an example the story one of the twins tells about his life. It's one of the novel'a stories-within-the-story. They are mainly uniform in length, about 5 pages each. That in itself might not have anything to do with constraints, but each story is so packed with unexpected details that it feels claustrophobic with constraints, as if Mathews wanted to squeeze the air out of conventional narrative. Paul begins by talking about his time in the Newell Academy, a place that plays a role in the plot later in the novel. It's the sort of introductory detail that readers of Conan Doyle and Agathe Christie will spot right away: an apparently trivial but actually consequential fact.
Then we learn what Paul studied there ("carpentry, masonry, basic engineering," mechanics, business). It's the sort of list where a reader will be wondering which subject propelled the speaker's later career—and in that sense, it isn't a trope of detective fiction, but of realism.
Paul catches the eye of a teacher named Ned Linnen. That will catch the eye of every reader, because we already know Paul went into fabric manufacture. So it's an alert—not the first one—that names are metafictional jokes.
Paul works as a bricklayer, then as an architect's assistant, and finally he sets up a business "selling textiles for architectural use." That could be a realist gesture, since the oddity of the job description might contribute to its reality effect: but it could also be a constraint, something like "combine architecture + fabric."
Next up there's a really odd litany of products and places, all in one short paragraph: he buys "a couple of hundred bales of Thai silk," then cuts them into abstract designs and sells them "to a retail bank in Ljubljana," then he makes "soothing" mauve curtains and carpets "for the waiting room of our clinic," and then he does some work in fashion, making "gauze djellebahs." To me, this sounds quintessentially Oulipean, the product of a list of a half-dozen constraints: "mention Thailand," "mention silk," and so on. It does not create a sense of greater realism: in fact it may cause a reader to scratch their head and wonder why they're being told these things. That uncertainty spills over into the metafictional when Paul's friends stop him to ask about the "soft kepi" caps they have seen around town.
The pleasure here is knowing there's a force field of constraints all around the narrative, and it's distorting what would have been a conventional story into something slightly surreal and absurd. (As Mathews says in his 1986 essay, constraints are for "tracking down the otherness hidden in language.") The late surrealism in Oulipo is generally harmless—you won't encounter trauma, like you might in Breton or Ernst, because the constraints are like rubber bumpers stopping the narrative from crashing. It's soothing to be pushed around gently by the constraints, and the sort of comfort Mathews is after requires an unusual number of deviations.
The deviations from convention aren't as thick as in Perec's A Void but they are denser than in his Life A User's Manual. The overall effect, for me, when it works, is a state of perpetual bemusement, where nothing makes too much sense. Violence and sex are defanged: there are moments of explicit sex and disgusting violence—like prying an onion out of a dead man's mouth, where it had been used as a gag—but they are softened by their affinity to the odd details that are distributed on every page.
Where the pleasure doesn't work, for me, are those places where I wish I did not know someone was watching out for me, guarding me against overly conventional, realist, romantic, or sentimental narratives, steering me to a world where I am reassured, several times a page, that not everything has deep meaning, and life is just full of little swerves.
May 25, 2018
THE SOLITARY TWIN is on one level a fantastic tale about the denizens of an odd fishing town (but who more resemble the quirky ensemble cast of a three-act set in an upper-west-side drawing room) but by the end, mathews' language, which feels at times like disembodied style itself, snaps the constellation of fantasy together into a truly oedipal lightning strike of anger and grief, artificially constructed and yet real... it's a stunning novel and you should feed it to your mind.
one doesn't read harry mathews for his perspective on labor. there are several economic fables in this work from a barely ironized, capitalist pov (michael bloomberg even makes a cameo). and yet i forgive entirely this near total lack of evolved class consciousness. that's not to say this doesn't muck things up at times -- for example, here, in an oddly flat and sometimes ridiculous section about May '68. and yet this unworldly worldliness also gifts mathews with extraordinary ability to punctuate narrative habits and be singularly voluptuous with language. stories are baroque with interwoven details, astonishingly placed, and with deep zings of psychological observation.
no doubt there are hidden machinations behind the scenes, oulipian blackbox hijinks. how else can you manifest a patina of defamiliarized idioms like “I remember the whole beginning — it was a seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong”(105). and yet i prefer to remain generally ignorant of the work’s constraints and simply ride the thrill of the normalized unexpected to its deracinating conclusions… ashbery called THE SOLITARY TWIN harry mathews’ finest novel — and it and CIGARETTES are def my personal contenders for the title.
__________________
Harry Mathews obituary in the New York Times.
Daniel Levin Becker’s appreciation in the San Francisco Chronicle.
2007 interview with Mathews in the Paris Review.
one doesn't read harry mathews for his perspective on labor. there are several economic fables in this work from a barely ironized, capitalist pov (michael bloomberg even makes a cameo). and yet i forgive entirely this near total lack of evolved class consciousness. that's not to say this doesn't muck things up at times -- for example, here, in an oddly flat and sometimes ridiculous section about May '68. and yet this unworldly worldliness also gifts mathews with extraordinary ability to punctuate narrative habits and be singularly voluptuous with language. stories are baroque with interwoven details, astonishingly placed, and with deep zings of psychological observation.
no doubt there are hidden machinations behind the scenes, oulipian blackbox hijinks. how else can you manifest a patina of defamiliarized idioms like “I remember the whole beginning — it was a seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong”(105). and yet i prefer to remain generally ignorant of the work’s constraints and simply ride the thrill of the normalized unexpected to its deracinating conclusions… ashbery called THE SOLITARY TWIN harry mathews’ finest novel — and it and CIGARETTES are def my personal contenders for the title.
__________________
Harry Mathews obituary in the New York Times.
Daniel Levin Becker’s appreciation in the San Francisco Chronicle.
2007 interview with Mathews in the Paris Review.
October 10, 2018
Ugg. Other than the ending, this was not a good book. At least it was short !
This is the story of an odd little town and two twin brothers who live there. There are four friends who get together and talk in the most pretentious dialogue ever and tell stories no one would ever tell. Nothing real about these people. They were insufferable, the book was insufferable.
I was curious about the lives of the twins, Paul and John, so I kept on reading. I did like the end so the stars bounced from one to two.
This is the story of an odd little town and two twin brothers who live there. There are four friends who get together and talk in the most pretentious dialogue ever and tell stories no one would ever tell. Nothing real about these people. They were insufferable, the book was insufferable.
I was curious about the lives of the twins, Paul and John, so I kept on reading. I did like the end so the stars bounced from one to two.
April 21, 2020
"Word kept spreading that this little community was developing according to unspoken principles that might be encapsulated in two words: what works." In Harry Matthews' final novella, everything works. It's lovely, playful, occasionally satirical; it keeps you on your toes. It also employs storytelling in some of what are recently considered Cuskian ways, and with equal success. This is the perfect novella to read like a sorbet between heavy book courses.
March 15, 2021
"1001 ночь" в декорациях примерно его же "Сигарет" и в формате повести. Все истории тут, помимо, связи с основным сюжетом, имеют отсылки к чьей-нибудь гениальной прозе ХХ века, например, первая - к Вальзеру. Ключи тоже даются, так что повесть становится двойной головоломкой: думаешь, как это связано с непонятными близнецами и что читать для расширения контекста. В итоге же - чистейшая готика.
July 19, 2019
This is a story about fascinating human life stories, unfolding nearly all in monologues between characters, a deft dance between different modes of telling and different lives likely all rigorously charted by some oulipan shifting viewpoint schema, with surprise crossovers between key elements of different tales to keep the reader on her toes. Weirdly, it's also replete with the myths of capitalism, wherein a don't-call-it-utopian community is explicitly founded by benevolent self-made guild-age financiers of exceedingly clear vision, characters are constantly pulling themselves up by their boot straps under free trade contexts, and Michael Bloomberg turns in a cameo. And (much worse) why is the central town explicitly designed to welcome immigrants only if they are (white) English speakers from former British colonies? That last detail almost seemed to be calling out the implicit societal barriers that exist within the defining American hallucination of the self-made fortune, but nothing else about this seems to bear out that intention. Matthews died 5 days after innaugeration day, 2017, this his final work. Call it the death spasm of late capitalist optimism.
April 20, 2020
An old fashioned novel in that it is set amongst a group of dinner party and get-together givers, who tell each other erotic or intriguing stories to keep themselves entertained in their small fishing village. A pair of twins, John and Paul arrive (there are other Beatle references; they have their qualities reversed here, John is sweet and likes to make love with the light out, Paul abrasive and wants to see everything). They are never seen together and intrigue the guests and hosts who set out to discover their story(ies). A beautiful piece of work.
March 11, 2024
My first "Harry Mathews" (but his last). While the structure of the book is a little odd, and I can tell he is playing around with story-telling conventions, it is nowhere near as experimental as I expected from his reputation, and I'm not sure exactly what he was aiming for. I may try some of his more famous work.
May 22, 2018
A weird, intricate winding story of two people trying to track down information about two people and getting caught up in sinuous stories about themselves and the surprising about of characters they meet within 112 pages. The story was not the primary thing being told here, which was fun, but would have been more fun if the story wasn't so interesting or the book was longer. As my first Harry Mathews, I probably should have started with something else, but my interest is piqued!
Also, if you are planning on getting one of the New Directions 2018 paperbacks with the grainy paper cover, in humidity that shit curls up like a Shirley Temple lookalike contest. Be forewarned!
Also, if you are planning on getting one of the New Directions 2018 paperbacks with the grainy paper cover, in humidity that shit curls up like a Shirley Temple lookalike contest. Be forewarned!
August 25, 2019
Typically quirky Mathews with lavish descriptions of food and clothing, genteel and witty characters, and an abundance of dense, coiled sentences studded with rare words. There is a somewhat melodramatic plot, a sort of Canterbury Tales of mini-stories (except with some internal connections). I enjoyed the Situationist philosopher who becomes a sort of neoliberal sleeper cell, secretly trying to foster innovation in government in his sleepy but perfect New England town.
January 17, 2022
this is the first time i’ve felt the urge to call a novel “sexy.” strong recommend…
June 2, 2019
I am the kind of convivial gentleman, happy to be made happy, who it’s gonna very much please to be able to report that the final novel of a writer of whom he is extremely fond is insanely great, a full-on valedictory masterpiece. Well, then, dagnabbit, huzzah, it would seem today is my day. For real and for serious. THE SOLITARY TWIN, the final novel of the very great Harry Matthews, is … very, very great. I swear, it is instantaneously one of my favourite American novels of all time (!). Now, you will note: a good many Goodreads reviewers are saying otherwise. Please know: I have looked at their comments and the situation is dire, friend, these people are embarrassing simpletons. A couple folks say only the ending is good. They seem to be saying that this is a good ending for a novel when in fact the ending of THE SOLITARY TWIN is the hilarious climax of a whole process making fun of “the novel” as a thing thick with tired customs. A great many folks seem to have entirely missed the boat. They were standing on the wrong dock. Doubtlessly they continue standing there, occasionally consulting their watches like absolute buffoons. Who am I? Why should you listen to me? Well, you know, I hope to present a cogent case in due course, but also you don’t have to take my word alone, here, look at that blurb from Matthews’s buddy John Ashbery on the front of the lovely New Directions, a blurb wherein Mr. Ashbery, one of the finest poets of his generation, calls the novel H.M.’s best. Strong words? Yes, strong words, but take them seriously. I’ve read one story collection and a whole bunch of his essays here and there, but I feel a little ashamed now that I come to the part where I admit that this is only the third Harry Mathews novel that I have read. (I will rectify this, sirs and madams, you have my word.) I have delved insufficiently to be in any position to assert that THE SOLITARY TWIN is Mathews’s best novel, but I will say that I love it even more, on both personal and I believe also quasi-sorta-objective levels, than the delightful Hallowed Works of Genius CIGARETTES and THE JOURNALIST. This is saying something. It also means that I can at least place myself in a position to say that I cannot categorically contradict Mr. Ashbery’s bold avowal. Harry Matthews is probably best known as the near entirety of the American Branch of Oulipo, L'Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, a bunch of sons and daughters of Raymond Queneau who, to keeps matters simple, used generative constrains, all kinds of weird computational formulae, to produce literary works. What this has tended to look like in the fiction of Harry Matthews is literary forms with a whole lot of complications produced by the author so that he himself has to contend with them, and invariably this ends up involving all sorts of complicated plotting convulsions that have to be worked out like equations, unforeseen consequences that have to be addressed in good faith, and basic scaffolding that has to be extremely complicated but also structurally sound. CIGARETTES and THE JOURNALIST are works of this kind. So, as it should happen, is THE SOLITARY TWIN, but to me what makes this final work so divine is its comparable lightness of touch, its sweet ease. While it is full of endless wonderful passages and great amusing riffs it is a Harry Matthews novel and above all a comedy ABOUT PLOTTING ITSELF. A novel in large part about novels and a comedy about what they tend to get up to, bless them dearly. One thing plotting in novels tends to involve is dubious coincidences and Matthews has a great jolly time slamming us with outrageous coincidences, fast and furious. Other facets of standard plotting and novelistic narration are likewise toyed with like a ball of yarn. I’m going to now proceed to more or less lay it out for you without spoiling things I ought not spoil. I definitely write these reviews in large part for my own future consultation, but ideally readers of this review will still wish to, you know, read the book itself. John and Paul have come to town. New Bentwick by name. “A strange town. For years it had survived as an extenuated fishing village of immemorial origin.” John and Paul are identical twins. “They wore the same clothes, chino trousers and open-necked sweaters, in John’s case adorned with a faded maroon neckerchief. Both were addicted to the shellfish harvested year-round from the rocks and sand of the coast: little clams, winkles, cockles, crabs, and above all sea urchins—their dessert, as both said. They drank only McEwan’s Indian pale ale and smoked the same thin black Brazilian cigars. They drove identical cars, beige postwar Dyna-Panhards from France, indistinguishable except by their liscence plates.” Et cetera. Despite all the identical trimmings adorning this pair of identical twins, the two men have markedly different personalities and appear to make a point of actively avoiding one another. They are never together, to the point that a high degree of strategic calculation has got to be in play. Berenice Tinker and Andreas Boeyens, newish arrivals themselves, newly lovers, have each recently befriended the opposing twin, she John, he Paul. Berenice and Andreas go to dinner with at the Hydes’. Geoffrey Hyde, Mercantile Assessor for the Borough, and his wife Margot. All agree that the apparent absence of a relationship between the twins is unusual, perhaps even sinister, but Geoffrey has some inside dope. A woman named Wicheria appears to serve as the twins’ go-between. Wicheria. Geoffrey: “She wears outlandish clothes like green velvet pantaloons and musketeer boots, if you see what I mean. She often dyes her long full hair a kind of dark smoldering red. Her smile fairly glitters. She is in fact almost beautiful, in her mildly provocative way.” Wicheria, should it need to be emphasized, possesses a “general air of witchiness that was apparently the source of her nickname.” Berenice-Andreas and the Hydes get along like a house on fire. They decide to continue having dinners together, dinners in which they will take turns telling stories. Berenice kicks things off by telling a story about a valet, a story from real life, and one that just so happens (super weirdly, super coincidentally) to involve her still-fairly-new lover Andreas’s family and a different spelling of his surname (Boyens instead of Boeyens). (Note the later bit of business involving Mehmed and Ahmet, or is it Mehmet and Ahmed?) Andreas runs a somewhat unusual publishing company, and he started this publishing company in order to cultivate a literature focused on “imagination demonstrated in the way unusual people chose or were forced to live their lives, and those lives duly recorded by others if necessary but best by themselves.” He believes that the lives of the mysterious twins, John and Paul, could well prove the crown jewel of the whole operation. Dinner party story exchange continues. (All this business about groups of good-natured folks exchanging stories whilst living them may well cause one to think of John Barth, especially the late stuff, but let me just say that Harry Matthews is the meticulous seamstress to John Barth’s brusque construction worker.) Berenice-Andreas have dinner with the Hydes, this time Captain Kipper and Sergeant Kerr of the local police force join them (both men testifying to Wicheria’s praiseworthy character). Geoffrey Hyde tells the story of the enterprising Jewish entrepreneur Malachi, transplanted in roundabout fashion to Florida after his parents perished in the Holocaust, and creator, in collaboration with a company of irreverent actors known as the The Beach Buoys, of a television serial entitled MEDICAL WARFARE IN METRO-DADE COUNTY. It seems Geoffrey met this Malachi on an airplane. Malachi attempted to conscript him in a campaign, involving something like the power of literary suggestion, to take revenge on people of German heritage for the crimes of the Nazis. Geoffrey goes on to reveal his secret history as a poet, secret it would seem even to his wife Margot, and how a poem he wrote appeared as if to foresee the famous events of May ’68. He went on to discover soixante-huit-style “permanent revolution” in the temporary vocation of customs official … before then taking on his current extremely successful position as Mercantile Assessor for the Borough in good ol’ out-of-the-way New Bentwick. Later we hear more from Geoffrey about his experiences in France in 1968, the Situationists and all that, some passages I love very much, and we finally catch up with Wicheria, who treats us to some genealogy and reveals her personal connection to the enterprising Jewish entrepreneur Malachi, subject of Geoffrey’s dinnertime story, the man Geoffrey once met on a plane. Yes, super coincidental. Delightfully, absurdly, expeditiously coincidental. Now we gear up for the ending. I’m not going to give much away. Let’s just say that first we are subjected to a wonderful and outrageous reframing of the narrative regime of the novel we are reading and then we are given the ending we cannot help but be given, the ending that some half-wits say is the only good thing here. I mean, yeah, it’s a good ending, a ridiculously great ending, but it is parodic, ridiculous, and a kind of profound justice, punchline justice, almost a kind of charming impudence. I have this picture in my mind of Harry Mathews taking peyote in the desert and being visited by a giant floating Agatha Christie head. Harry: “Agatha, my God, Agatha. Do you bring me the secret?” Agatha: “The secret? Harry, dear Harry, the secret is sublime and glittering and incandescent and too goddamn stupid for words.”
May 7, 2018
The last, posthumous novel by the great Mathews, an ode to the divine pleasures of storytelling. In a small European port town, a couple of couples are united in their mutual fascination with John and Paul, local twins conspicuous for never having been seen together in the same place. The two couples agree to enjoy their company together by telling each other stories—stories about a seemingly random assortment of characters and their peculiar life histories. As the stories accumulate, connections between them begin to arise, hinting at deeper connections. In the end, it all comes together with the sly, elegant grace one expects of Mathews. As with all of Mathews works, you can tell there’s some unique structure being deployed, but here, he seems to be explicitly saying it doesn’t matter what or why the structure is, as long as he, and hopefully you, the reader, enjoys how fucking well he goes about playing with it. As with life, no?
November 13, 2017
Set in a small fishing town somewhere in New England, this is ostensibly the story of estranged twins and how their presence in the town affects the other residents. Through a series of sub-stories, each told by a different resident, the reader comes to learn more about the twins and the other characters, who are linked in unlikely and surprising ways.
I requested this review copy from Edelweiss based on the information that Mathews is considered to be the only American Oulipo writer. I would be interested to know what construct he used in writing this. Whatever it was, the book felt like an unsuccessful experiment to this reader.
I requested this review copy from Edelweiss based on the information that Mathews is considered to be the only American Oulipo writer. I would be interested to know what construct he used in writing this. Whatever it was, the book felt like an unsuccessful experiment to this reader.
never-finished
May 18, 2018DNF at page 78. Not what I was advertised in the slightest. I don't even know how to describe what this book is actually about, except it's very long conversations/storytelling that have nothing to do with these mysterious twins, and instead with marketing and politics on other characters's various experiences. Also, the big walls of different people's dialogue mashed into one was getting on my nerves from the start.
August 8, 2021
The book should be renamed "A collection of loosly connected stories including that of the Twins."
The book is is predictable to an extend but that does not mean that it's boring. It lures you in into its small town gossips. But there were parts which were utterly unrealistic.
The book is is predictable to an extend but that does not mean that it's boring. It lures you in into its small town gossips. But there were parts which were utterly unrealistic.
January 24, 2021
I loved Tlooth, so I had to read more.
The story is told through characters sharing their own stories, and each of these intertwine to reveal serendipitous connections and aligned fates. And since the story is told through stories, there is something to be desired in terms of immediate action, you could say.
It ends almost predictably.
Recommended for economists who would appreciate the financial subtleties in this work that I paid little time trying to understand, and which I felt were tangential at best.
The story is told through characters sharing their own stories, and each of these intertwine to reveal serendipitous connections and aligned fates. And since the story is told through stories, there is something to be desired in terms of immediate action, you could say.
It ends almost predictably.
Recommended for economists who would appreciate the financial subtleties in this work that I paid little time trying to understand, and which I felt were tangential at best.
March 31, 2018
“I remember the whole beginning—it was a see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong.”
May 14, 2018
A short book, a long story. Reminds me of a little of all Mathews' previous books plus his life. Like a mix between the Journalist, Country Cooking, and The Conversions.
December 27, 2018
I was all set to give this book one star and then the end pulled it out. It's a short book that reads like a long painful one, but then, in the end, I think I'm glad I read it.
January 26, 2019
Winding narrative, stories within the story, really suspenseful and a surprise fucked up ending - short book, solid read
February 1, 2023
John and Paul are identical twins, whose history - lovers, political and social background - is one huge clusterfuck. The deeper the reader is pulled into the mystery, the more allure and confusion is raised. Brilliant story with a hugely satisfying and mind-blowing conclusion.
February 20, 2024
A depressing slow moving story where stories are told leading to the real story.
January 12, 2025
Fun, weird story
October 11, 2025
ATT: You are reading a pro forma Transmission from the Godhead of Retroactive Reviews 2025
I have no idea why I didn’t write anything about ______. It was so fucking _________ and _________ that, possibly, I was at a rare loss for words. Or maybe I was on the lam. I can’t remember; hey, it’s been a few since ___________ and I crossed paths.
(If you’re reading this, this is a form letter—a placeholder, if you must—done retroactively as a stop-gag corrective of historical wrongs I committed by failing to uphold my end of the book-reader compact. That compact, my own, dictates that I record SOMETHING/ANYTHING (not a Rundgren reference, but…) to mark my engagement with a given novel/work/etc. at a fixed time in my personal life history. These ‘reviews’ are not really reviews (no shit, I know) at all; their purpose is that they act as pretty accurate reflections of where my head/heart was at the time of engagement. It’s something between the book and I, and a good way to check your hubris from time-to-time. If you find any part of it enriching, that’s a wild compliment. If not, you can just feel free to move along—I can almost guarantee that no offense was genuinely intended. Almost.)
So, clearly, __________ pretty much made me revaluate my entire ____________ and ________edifices, those false shells I’d enacted over years to protect whatever core ‘me’ I felt uncomfortable exposing. And it is so fucking _______! The _______? Unbelievable, right? Good/bad times…Ahhhh. Anyhow, __________ by ____ _________ obviously deserves a reread to inform a proper write-up. In between now and whenever that reread happens (foregoing death or living on the lam again), all I can say is ___________________.
I know. That’s why I’ll be back.
X Cody
10.25
I have no idea why I didn’t write anything about ______. It was so fucking _________ and _________ that, possibly, I was at a rare loss for words. Or maybe I was on the lam. I can’t remember; hey, it’s been a few since ___________ and I crossed paths.
(If you’re reading this, this is a form letter—a placeholder, if you must—done retroactively as a stop-gag corrective of historical wrongs I committed by failing to uphold my end of the book-reader compact. That compact, my own, dictates that I record SOMETHING/ANYTHING (not a Rundgren reference, but…) to mark my engagement with a given novel/work/etc. at a fixed time in my personal life history. These ‘reviews’ are not really reviews (no shit, I know) at all; their purpose is that they act as pretty accurate reflections of where my head/heart was at the time of engagement. It’s something between the book and I, and a good way to check your hubris from time-to-time. If you find any part of it enriching, that’s a wild compliment. If not, you can just feel free to move along—I can almost guarantee that no offense was genuinely intended. Almost.)
So, clearly, __________ pretty much made me revaluate my entire ____________ and ________edifices, those false shells I’d enacted over years to protect whatever core ‘me’ I felt uncomfortable exposing. And it is so fucking _______! The _______? Unbelievable, right? Good/bad times…Ahhhh. Anyhow, __________ by ____ _________ obviously deserves a reread to inform a proper write-up. In between now and whenever that reread happens (foregoing death or living on the lam again), all I can say is ___________________.
I know. That’s why I’ll be back.
X Cody
10.25
February 9, 2023
Excellent descriptions of food. Also a great book
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