The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 16 June 2023
by Ann Quin
This little book is a bit of a wild ride. Ann Quin was a British avant-garde author who made a splash in the 1960s with a handful of innovative novels challenging structure and patriarchy. This novel is narrated by a man chasing his ex-wife and her new lover across the American southwest, for no discernable reason than obsessive jealousy and compulsive self-abuse. Quin wrote as a member of and as a response to the very much male dominated movement of Beatnik and post-Beat writers of her era. The baroque stylings of this novel can be inspired by, or a critique of, William Burroughs's cut-and-paste zaniness of Naked Lunch. This sort of structural deconstruction appeals to readers, particularly young ones, as a sort of stream of critique of letters and cultural reference. It can be fun, but it can also be exhausting. As a reader, you may find yourself desperate for something to hang a plot on. And Quin's plot is thin and evasive. Still, there is a cutting and almost brutal expose of road novels, the discovery of America on the open road. It ain't pretty here, by a long shot, but there are inspired almost poetical moments throughout. Our protagonist acknowledges the quixotic nature of his quest. We don't know for sure if he is the pursuer or the pursued. Family expectations, a bugaboo of young writers of the time, seem to arc over the story. There is a hilariously long passage of letters to our hero from his abandoned family. One isn't quite sure what to make of the Native American ceremony that lurks in the background.
Sadly, Quin had a troubled mind, and she ended her own life off the Brighton pier at the young age of 37, taking the route of Virgina Woolf who, herself, seems to lurk in the background here. This review refers to a recent edition of the novel which sports a flattering photograph of the author on the cover. To be honest, this made it difficult to open the book and remember that the protagonist is male. One spends a fair amount of the story imagining our hero as a woman, and in many parts of the story, particularly in the gender fluid 21st century, it still works.
See also: [Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson]