The Journalist

by Harry Mathews

A blend of postmodern metafiction and old-style bedroom farce, The Journalist explores the elusive, sometimes illusive, boundaries between facts and the fictions we weave around them. The novel's protagonist, living at a time that might be the present in a city that might be anywhere, has decided for reasons of mental hygiene to keep a detailed record of his thoughts, words, and deeds. Very quickly, however, the project begins to absorb his entire life, as the increasingly meticulous recording of experience threatens to supplant experience itself. To make matters worse, what he records offers its own grist for his devoted wife suddenly grows secretive, his equally devoted mistress turns evasive, his frustratingly independent son might or might not be visiting that same mistress behind his back, and his closest friend begins acting in mysterious ways (and is it just his imagination, or is this friend having clandestine meetings with his wife?). His ever more convoluted perceptions breed a dark muddle of suspicion, leading to a climax that is at once intensely funny and excruciatingly poignant.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, American, Literature

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Harry 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.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are always two lives: life without and life within…

When I was ten or eleven I used to stand to one side of the bathroom mirror and converse with someone I imagined out of sight around its edge, on the far side of the glass. Often I’m ashamed of such memories, but this one seems a faithful image of how I still am: the flesh-and-bones me sitting at the table and another invisible part of me pursuing its own life.

The protagonist’s inner life consists of writing in his diary about what he was doing in the outer world… His observations, musings and recollections belong there as well… And his dreams may be considered as some inner adventures…

A female figure, forbiddingly helmeted like a horned Valkyrie, points the way up a muddy trail stamped by small hooves. I’m sure I know what to expect farther on but can’t remember whatever it obviously is. I slog along. At the top of the hill I find a chalet apparently made of writing paper. I approach a window to the right of the front door. I call out; someone answers. A conversation begins. “Can you let me in?” “Glue yourself together and follow the ruled lines, here in maxi format.”

Obsessively he strives to record absolutely everything… No time to live and work is left… Maniacally he divides his notes into multiple categories… Two main denotations: factual and subjective… And a lot of subdivisions… Nineteen gradations in all…
Here is an observation categorized as: Factual → personal → other matters → health and at the same time Factual → concerns others → communications of some kind → conversations in person…

Odds and ends:
After the comfort of peeing in the washbasin, remember to wipe off the edge. Far more than by the act, Daisy is disgusted by the yellow spots (really orange: rusted-autumn-leaf orange).

However nineteen is not enough for him and he keeps subdividing… He writes a journal… He is a journalist…

I haven’t been a blind fool: I’ve been completing my apprenticeship, and the God of Journals has opened the gate for me to accede to the royal way.

Tendency to split hairs may seriously damage one’s consciousness.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love difficult fiction, since even if I don’t understand the author’s particular intentions, I can pick and choose meanings like at some ontological deli. The trouble with some OuLiPo work, alas—and more broadly in the novels of Harry Mathews—is that his novel-length games pose specific problems and solve them in specific ways, often using egghead algorithms I am too dim to comprehend. As with Tlooth, I was entertained for the duration, but could have used a detailed roadmap. [This is a roundabout way of saying I didn’t understand how this novel ended, and if anyone wants to enlighten me, please do so below].

The Journalist has a simple premise: a businessman recovering from a nervous breakdown keeps a journal of his post-recovery life, using a very pristine prose style akin to a certain Harry Mathews, that gradually descends into Nicholson Baker-like tracts of precise, exhaustive and tedious detail (as in The Mezzanine). He breaks all the categories of his day into sets and subsets, leading to an almost symphonic string of paranoid ramblings and pedantic detail. Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ springs to mind at once—the premise here is the same.

The novel is hilarious and oddly chilling. Yet it falls into that OuLiPo trap of obsessing on inanimate objects, like the most boring moments in Perec, or in Robbe-Grillet’s entire corpus.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can not believe I just (2/20/12) heard this book reviewed on NPR! Though where the reviewer got the idea it is Mathew's least appreciated book I'll never know... unless it's true what he said that even Mathew's himself says it was a failure because no one "got" it. Hey Harry I got it! In my way at least...


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


So how is the main character of The Journalist reduced by book's end to a raving infantile lunatic? He gets the bright idea to write a journal chronicling every event in his very normal life, but the journaling soon gets out of hand as he categorizes and sub-categorizes and sub-sub categorizes, etc, etc. every mundane event (which by the way elevates these events so far into the fascinating that they become imponderables), and dreams intrude and take over, and the journaling begins to consume his life and eventually includes chronicling his chronicling his chronicling and so on... What a vicious and hilarious whirlpool!

This book is wisdom literature. Seriously. But of the extreme Huang Po or Jnana Yoga sort, wherein all phenomena are seen as manifestions of mind, and even mind is seen as manifestation of mind; in other words there is no place in reality to gain a sure conceptual foothold, because Reality can not be expressed through concepts, and unfortunately all of our expressions are ultimately concepts. Intentionally or not Matthews as provided a hilarious and down-to-earth representation of this sort of wisdom literature. Nevermind that the main character seems to be a raving infantile lunatic as the book concludes...

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

here’s a fantastic long interview with the great novelist harry mathews

in it [an interview which now seems deleted from the interwebs] i learned a few things, some a little shocking. not so surprising: harry mathews loves robert walser. who can resist? some nice bits about cage, merce cunningham, and john ashbery too. but the sentence that hit home was that mathews perceives his 1994 masterpiece, THE JOURNALIST, a “flop.”

HM: It was a total flop.

HUO: Why?

HM: I don’t know. I think it’s a terrific book myself. [Laughs:]

i stopped reading and had to pace the room. though sadly such a thing is almost expected, it struck me hard how isolated readers and writers of advanced fiction are that a groundbreaker of the novel form such as THE JOURNALIST could be so ill-used. or that its author should not be well rewarded with if not lucre (unlikely) then at least some deserved renown.

a subtle novel THE JOURNALIST is, like his CIGARETTES, conceptual. meaning its value is at the very least only partially related to the emotional revelations of its plot and characters. written in an elegant prose style that goes down devilishly smoothly, THE JOURNALIST concerns the documentary activities of a european executive who is insidiously but most certainly losing his shit.

the details of a bourgeois’s daily life–his affairs and wines and suits–may prejudice some readers against, however THE JOURNALIST in part transcends and in part satirizes its class environs through its gradually unfolding structure–an experiment of epistemology that continually and progressively asks: what is identity? what can we know? what can we record? and how is a fact changed by our observing of it?

and about that style. despite, or because of, the conceptual emphasis of this work–mathews’ narrator records with a refined wit and sensual language that makes for absolutely compulsive reading. sly tongue-in-cheek jokes, casual anecdotes, life stories (a classic mathews tale, that of Zoltan the waiter, on page 49-54), wardrobes, masturbation, drugs are all accounted in this light-touch, masterful prose.

also robustly recorded: the narrator’s dreamlife. the one thing oulipians may do best of all–better than the surrealists who worshiped it also (see the interview for HM’s views on the surrealists)–is confront and engage the subconscious.

the general plot: a man tries harder and harder to document his own life, going batty in the process as language and its chores proliferate and separate him from reality. it’s also a profound allegory on the writing life–its obsessions and its limitations and unique possibilities.

in this recent forum on the future of fiction, one writer proclaims the future will be “conceptualism.” if so, conceptual writing is also the novel’s recent and deep past. (i remember a j. hoberman review of early 20th century cinema where he said something like: in the beginning–it was all experimental.) …in that same forum another writer says something i really dug:

"A hope, not a prediction: I’d love to see fiction that concentrates on the things fiction does uniquely well—chief among these the inhabiting of thought, the mapping of consciousness—rather than chasing vainly after more popular art forms. I like film and TV, too…but what’s the point of a fiction that envies and emulates them, and thus dooms itself to being second-rate visual culture rather than first-rate verbal culture?" —Michael Griffith

the mapping of consciousness in fiction–the possibilities and paths of thought–are areas in which harry mathews has been expertly at play since his 1962’s THE CONVERSIONS. reward yourself and try him.

[Jim Elkins]

The Idea of a Book So Strange It Teaches You a New Language

I have decided to title all my reviews from now on, because I've found -- after 300 reviews -- that I tend to use books to open problems of writing. Each book tends to raises a different problem, so the titles are a way of keeping those in order.

That first paragraph is written in emulation of the narrator in Mathews's book. He has recently had a nervous breakdown, and is heading for another. He decides to control his experiences by keeping a journal, and as the narrative progresses the journal becomes more and more elaborate. I bought this book because I am interested in the idea of writing a novel that becomes stranger as it goes along, until eventually -- in the version of this idea that the Norwegian novelist Thure Erik Lund recounted to Karl-Ove Knausgaard -- the novel itself teaches the reader an entirely new language. In Lund's metaphor, the language is Chinese, and the book becomes so complex, and at the same time so compelling, that by the end the reader finds herself reading in Chinese. (I heard this story from Knausgaard in April 2016, and I posted the pertinent information on Facebook on April 29, including interviews in which Knausgaard has retold this story of Lund's.)

The Journalist is partly such a book. The narrator becomes increasingly agitated when he is off his medications, and he calms himself by starting a journal. The journal becomes "Chinese" when he has the idea of inventing categories for his entries. At first he classifies all entries "A" for public and "B" for subjective or private. Then he divides both A and B into I and II -- I for for events that involve other people, and II for those that concern only himself. Then he divides each of those subdivisions into two parts, and then each of those subdivisions into two or three parts (pp. 84-85). From that point on, the diary -- the text of this novel -- is indented, to make room for the narrator's classifications of each thought, which run along the left margin: B II/a.1, A I,II, and so forth.

For the first half of The Journalist the diary is not presented as a model for the novel. There is a passage in which the narrator's description of his project has an uncanny resemblance to one of Knausgaard's ways of talking about My Struggle:

"I know I'm not Plato, or even Boethius, nor Diderot or Maganoff either. I haven't got profundity or clout, nothing but a devotion to the truth. So is my activity the pursuit of truth? It's a pursuit of the truth, a laborious, pedestrian, accumulative one, and not less than that. Not profundity but extensiveness (I escaped the lure of scope): establishing bounds as broad as I can imagine them, extending them day after day, and within them honestly gathering all I find." [p. 185]

(Perhaps this would fit Knausgaard better if "ambition" were substituted for "the truth.") But the diary concept works less well as the novel progresses. Increasingly, the narrator's project is an allegory of all fiction writing, especially when he reflects on the fact that it's an entirely solitary enterprise (p. 153) and when he says he devotes "more time, thought, and passion to it than to anything else" (p. 191). The diary is less effectively proposed as an allegory of all fiction writing when the narrator has a fantasy that an editor might be interested in publishing the diary (p. 206)—this isn't a convincing move, because it makes a reader think of the actual author and his career, rather than the narrator, who is a generalized figure for a writer.

In theory, then, this could be an example of a Chinese novel in Lund's sense. One reason it isn't is that a reader of Mathews's book skips by the narrator's obsessive annotations. For the most part the narrator's diary runs continuously on past the annotations, making it unnecessary to learn, read, or remember them. (In the allegory: you can read this book without learning Chinese.) At one point the narrator decides to write an index, and he does, but we never see it, providing an additional reason not to learn the new language. He also thinks of turning his diary into a journal about writing (a "Journal of the Journal," p. 195), but again we don't see the results of that notion.

The closest the book comes to Lund's, and Knausgaard's, interest is on p. 191, when the narrator ponders his ramifying classification system:

"I imagine duplicating each existing category with its journalistic parallel: the first records an event, while the second records the event of its recording — for every A I/b.2b, a J (for Journal): A I/b.2b (or it could be in quotation marks, A I/b.2b, and "A I/b.2b"). I know that won't work. Consider this question: how can I include what happens when I write about A I/b.2b (what is happening around me, what I may be thinking, what my body is feeling, what is experienced by whatever one calls the soul — the self? the selves? the shelves?)? If I put a duplicating frame around my old system, then I would have to make a frame for the frame, to include what was happening while I make the frame, to include what was happening while I made the frame, and then another frame for that — a discouragingly infinite regression: not only A I/b.2b and J: A I/b.2b but J:J:A I/b.2b and J:J:J:A I/b.2b (or A I/b.2b, "A I/b.2b," ""A I.b.2""...). [p. 191]

This is actually readable, and it is close to "Chinese." But it's the only passage of its kind. The book ends with a disjointed series of plot summaries, tying up the narrator's paranoid fantasies, making the entire book uncharacteristically, and unnecessarily, neat. I would rather have been compelled to read Chinese, all the way to the end, even if it remained, or even became, increasingly difficult, unrewarding, and incomprehensible. I agree with Lund and Knausgaard: there is something compelling in that model of a novel.

2016, revised 2024

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

It might be because of the rather manic mood I've been in of late, but I found The Journalist to be one of those rare novels that sucked me in so much I began to actually feel as the narrator was feeling. Not sure if it was mere identification with the character, or the novel's stylistic flair, that so well communicated our narrator's prolix state of mind, but I swear I began to feel manic myself in sympathy with him. I was quite terrifyingly drawn into the journalist's vortex as he spiraled out of control in the words he thought he was writing to help his recovery from a mental breakdown. I, too, often fantasize narratives as I walk along, sit on park benches, or what-have-you; I, too, imagine writing down all I perceive in a single moment, dream of having some sort of eternal narrative of my every experience, thought, and perception. Surely to write at all is to invite the madness of attempting to overwrite one's entire experience, the whole perceivable world in fact, with words, to render existence in one's own view of it in a never-ending simulacrum. Once one begins to write at all, the invitation to completeness and total world erasure through the text is always there.

I hadn't felt quite so overtaken by a narrator's particular state of being since reading Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, when I swear I shared in the consul's drunkenness by literary proxy. Honestly, I'd set that novel down and struggle to get out of my chair, the room a swirling blur around me. Words can have no actual inebriating effect, can they? Surely they are only words on a page, are they not???

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certainly an inventive creation here by a very talented writer, but it will have no lasting quality for me that I think I will remember. I am purely rating this book as to how much I liked it and not how good and well-written it actually was. I simply "liked it" on goodreads terms, and sometimes that just has to be just about grand enough.

[Sue Bridehead (A Pseudonym) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is probably best defined as a sad meta farce. I found it increasingly unnerving in some ways because the obsessive manner in which the narrator seeks to chronicle and compartmentalize his days is all too familiar to me; probably to anyone living in this age of over sharing and constant account updating. The narrator's classification system for tracking his daily events isn't so different from how we filter our own modern lives, deciding what goes on Facebook, Goodreads, Pinterest, a blog, etc.

As the plot came to a head in the last pages, I found I empathized a lot (too much?) with the narrator's thoughts and behaviors, which seemed entirely rational based on the evidence (as presented and interpreted by the narrator), but which are judged insane by everyone else. This is such a startlingly dead-on depiction of being caught up in your own head. Anyone who's ever had a bout of paranoia will probably find this work to be a masterpiece of accuracy. Just make sure you're in sound mental condition before reading.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow. Why is Harry Mathews not better known? This is one of those books that me feel elated while reading it. It also made me feel feverish and a bit disoriented... As the novel goes along, the narrator progresses deeper and deeper into a sort of insane lucidity that makes perfect sense while you're reading it, but which is without a doubt unhealthy. This book and its meditations on why we live, how we can do away with the superfluous parts of our life that take away from being involved in what we truly enjoy (and how our efforts to do away with such superfluousness can lead in turn to other aspects of the exact same problem), time and its sub-divisions, etc., made me anxious, obsessing over the same sorts of things that presumably lead the narrator to his nervous breakdown. Perhaps a bit too convincing... I would have given it five stars, except the ending seemed a bit too tidy for the complex set of problems raised in this book.

[Yuri Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

What Matthews tells me is that attempts to “objectively” record and analyse experience are just as likely to report and depict a mistaken or distorted reality – and that such efforts are only useful in as much as they bring us to the “And then ...” moment, at which point narrative commences and becomes its own reality.
While admiring the effort and risks taken (successfully, for the most part), I can’t help feeling this work is a little too clever for its own good.

[Sonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think Harry Mathews is my favorite living writer. Every time I read him I want to be him for a week or two.

[Kurishin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's never quite clear that the narrator is, in fact, a journalist and it doesn't really matter.
The novel could also be titled, The Introvert or The Middle-Aged Introvert or The Middle-Aged Introvert Finishing Up a Mid-Life Crisis.
The reader lives in the narrator's head and that is as unreliable a place as you might think it would be. And it works, very well. Mathews manages us and the narrator well to carry tension while developing character.
Is the narrator experiencing a nervous breakdown? I'm not sure and that's part of the fun, and it is fun.
I would say that it might be best to read this in middle age.

[emi :0 · Rating 4 out of 5]

When he started doing math in the beginning i almost cried and put the book down... so happy i finished it.
Paul and Jago!! how could it have never even been a possibility in my mind shame shame shame.
loved watching this guy lose his mind xx

[Charles Cohen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is it just that I read Mathews too late? I read too many other postmodernists, and so his experimentations feel inauthentic, or simply uninteresting compared to Gaddis, or Perec, let alone Calvino or Barth or Barthelme (and yes, I'm not shocked that all those are dudes)?

Either way, meh.

[Lulu · Rating 5 out of 5]

A format that is as unique as the likes of classics such as Pale Fire, I can't say that this one is for everyone but one I definitely recommend. Madness, obsession, mystery just pulls you through the novel.

[Terry Pitts · Rating 2 out of 5]

What is real? What constitutes living? The narrator of "The Journalist" is loosing his grasp of questions like these. On doctor's orders, he begins to keep a journal, which is the book that we are reading. But, just like his life, his journal keeping quickly spins out of control. He begins to categorize entries - initially "between 'fact' and speculation, between what is external and verifiable and what is subjective." But then he adds subcategories to his categories, carefully attempting to uniquely identify every sentence in his journal. His journal-keeping inevitably starts to overshadows his life, until crisis strikes.

I found it a bit hard to maintain my interest as the journal became more and more about the minute analysis of the day's routine events or conversations. At the same time, I could only admire the rigor of Harry Matthews' writing as his narrator slipped into madness.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The very recent passing of esteemed octogenarian writer, critic, and translator (not to mention essentially sole American member of the Oulipo vanguard) Harry Mathews lit a fire under my ass in terms of finally getting around to THE JOURNALIST, which has been sitting here amid many other books in my office nook, w/ my eye ever on it, for some time now. This is a postponed encounter, and a rich one, as I am personally convinced that this is not only the finest Mathews I have read, but indeed a Great American Novel if ere there was one. This is very clearly a book of the Oulipo school (and in many ways speaks to the influence of Mathews' good buddy Georges Perec), which is to say that it is a book steeped in conceptual rigor, ribald game-play, and a kind of preoccupation w/ systems. And yes, as a "systems novel," it also bears some kinship w/ "postmodern" American writer like Thomas "the Ruggles" Pynchon and Joseph McElroy (who contributes a high-praise blurb to this Dalkey edition). The novel takes the form of a journal, and could be said to combine elements of Gogol's "Diary of a Madman," Perec's puzzles, and the kind of mad analytic insanity that Deleuze and Guattari praise in Beckett's MOLLOY (rock-sucking machine!). The real pleasure here, and one the French guys were never so much in the business of dispensing, is that this a feeling, human, and compulsively readable narrative, broken down as it is. And diced up like carrots. So we have a real accomplishment on our hands: conceptual audacity and virtuosity (a real intellectual feast!) in the service of a great read that is entertaining, instructive, and wise. There is even a way of reading this book as a testament to worthwhile ethics and the perils of mindfulness. Being a good person can be harrowing! I love this book so, so much. So much. Huzzah!

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really don't know what to say about this book. I don't think I fully understood the idea, or "game" as another reviewer referred to it. The story is told in journal form, by an unnamed narrator. He discusses everything from the trivialities of his day (what he wore, ate, how many sit-ups he did, etc.) to his feelings of alienation from his friends and family. As his journal writing increases in intensity, and as he obsesses over ways to categorize his thoughts, and daily activities, he becomes more and more removed from his family, friends and co-workers. His work suffers, as does his marriage, and even his extra-marital affair with a close family friend. He loses his job and and begins to become paranoid, assuming everyone is in league against him. He believes that even his doctors are conspiring to keep him oblivious to the treachery around him.

At first I thought I saw where this was going, I thought he would become so obsessed with the journal that he would, in some way, become the journal. But that didn't really seem to happen. His obsession and paranoia led him to spy on and confront his family and friends, finally sending him to the hospital. There his doctor insisted that he put a stop to his obsessive journal writing, and it seemed that he did, although it appeared he was still mentally unwell. All of his delusions were explained, in some degree, and the book just ended with him in the hospital, slowly recovering.

I think this was an interesting experiment, but for me, at least, it didn't fully work.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very strange book. Certainly worthwhile for those who, like the protagonist (and me) have at least a bit of the obsessive/compulsive about them. The narrator is not a journalist in the sense of one who writes for a newspaper or magazine, he is someone who has decided he must keep a journal. Actually, he works for a company that makes some kind of office furnishings (I think). Though the author is American, the book clearly takes place somewhere in Europe, most likely France. The narrator leads a somewhat comfortable, cultured existence with his wife, son, a pair of longtime friends, and a lover. He becomes obsessed with recording everything he experiences, and categorizing each passage into increasingly defined slots. Thus through most of the book in the left margin we find these classifications, e.g. A I a.3 means conversations in person, where A is things experienced (as opposed to thoughts), I means that the experience involves someone else, a means it is a communication, and 3 means that communication is in person (as opposed to written or on the phone). As the obsession develops, he tries to unravel secrets among his intimates, and slowly starts to lose it.
I can relate. This review is being written now because the option of writing Goodreads reviews was number 4 on a list of 44 possible activities for now, and the number 4 was selected by generating a random number using the stopwatch function on my digital watch.
It's a funny old world.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

The blurb about this (from the back cover) fails to convey the real atmosphere of the book; at best, it describes the first 50 to 100 pages. Much goes on behind the scenes in the journalist's life that we only glimpse momentarily towards the end. The other reviewer turns the character into an "unreliable narrator." A re-examination with this consideration in mind is probably worthwhile, but I never felt he was unreliable, merely personal to a flaw. The book is a journal, and as such, leaves much unstated as anyone would when writing about their own life. As revelations begin to pile up towards the end, I felt as if the journal I was reading took place within a larger novel, with intriguing plots that I never got to witness because my only inlet to the story was a character too wrapped up in his own issues to play a significant role in the larger melodrama.

My first foray in Mathews (I've been meaning to get to him for some time now), and I am delighted. Very very satisfying.

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is very post-modern and it has an unreliable narrator. Once you understand that,it makes it a lot easier to read and it is, in the end, once you figure out the journalist and by this Matthews means someone who is writing a journal not a professional writer--you will understand the book much better, and in the end, I think it is worth reading though difficult at first.

[Tami · Rating 2 out of 5]

this author can absolutely write. i especially liked the passages that narrated daily happenings. unfortunately for me (maybe not for anyone else), i didn't appreciate the passages that went off into the protagonist's OCD-like thoughts. i was expecting more madness and less OCD. my 2 stars reflect how i went into this with expectations... that weren't met. but i would try this author again.

[Godine Publisher & Black Sparrow Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I cannot express the extent of my admiration for Harry Mathews, which is well-nigh evangelical. There are now, here and there, other zephyrs blowing — Barth, Sontag, Barthelme, Pynchon — but none so strong as this."
— Thomas Disch

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

this made me feel sane. I don't quite know how I feel about this book yet...I'm going to let it sink in a bit first.

[stew · Rating 3 out of 5]

A maddening reading experience from a maddeningly written book that writes itself out of nothing into something.

[Ellen]

As seen on this list of fictional diaries.

[Erica · Rating 5 out of 5]

loved this book. Hilarious, weird, crazy.

[Tobias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stuff -- and the interesting structural choices do a fine job of echoing the narrator's own anxieties and fears regarding control.

[Heather scarlett victoria]

As i've said, one of my favorite writers. maps, intricacies, sexual poetry, etc.