More weird books, please! Two prize-winning authors add to the puzzle of the post-post-postmodern novel
- Written by Emmett Stinson, Associate Professor, Writing and Literature, University of Tasmania
What superseded literary postmodernism? Many contenders have been proposed: the new sincerity[1], metamodernism[2], even late postmodernism[3]. But none of these terms have persisted.
The novel in English may now be dominated by autofiction[4], but autofiction arguably extends key aspects of postmodernism: it critiques universalism and emphasises the self-reflexively performative nature of identity.
In a recent reflection[5] on Fredric Jameson’s seminal essay collection The Cultural Turn[6], McKenzie Wark noted this persistence of postmodern aesthetics:
there is now even retro-pomo, a kind of meta-retro, or meta-pomo, a return to the return to the return.
The two winners of the second Novel Prize[7] – Jonathan Buckley’s Tell[8] and Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over[9] – could not be more different in their substance and methods, but both seem part of this postmodern revival. They share an essentially postmodern disposition: both foreground the relational nature of truth; both inhabit popular genres for highbrow ends.
Review: Tell – Jonathan Buckley (Giramondo) & It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over – Anne de Marcken (Giramondo)
The Novel Prize has quickly established itself as a major award in Anglophone literary culture. The biennial prize is run by three excellent publishers: Giramondo[10] in Australia, New Directions[11] in North America, and Fitzcarraldo Editions[12] in the UK and Ireland. Winning manuscripts are published simultaneously by all three.
The inaugural winner, Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow[13] (2022), was a masterful work and one of my favourite Australian novels of the past few years. Though it nominally follows a mother and daughter travelling in Japan, it exists in a liminal space that feels simultaneously realist and surreal, exploring territory between traditional and experimental novelistic forms.
Given that all three publishers behind the Novel Prize are known for their complex and innovative fiction, Cold Enough for Snow was an ideal first winner: an exceptional novel with experimental qualities, but one that could still appeal to a broad audience.
Read more: The responsibilities of being: Jessica Au's precise, poetic meditation on mothers and daughters[14]
Do tell
The two fascinating novels that have won the most recent Novel Prize are not particularly difficult, but their relationship to established traditions of experimental literature is clear.
Jonathan Buckley.
Giramondo
Read more:
Bad art friends – Jen Craig may be the best Australian writer you've never heard of[18]
Zombie commune
Anne De Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over takes on the great American zombie novel.
It can seem as if there are more inversions of zombie narratives than there are straightforward ones: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend[19] (1954) was turning the genre on its head well before we got Pride and Prejudice and Zombies[20] (2009) and zombie rom-coms like Warm Bodies[21] (2010).
It Lasts Forever depicts a post-apocalypse that feels simultaneously sublime and absurd. The opening gag works because the zombies are still essentially human in character: the narrator discovers her arm has fallen off, so she tries to reattach it in entirely practical ways with the help of a friend.
She lives in a sort of commune with other zombies, who engage in new-agey religious rituals to ward off hunger, and she ruminates on the Téa Leone television vehicle, Madame Secretary[22] (2014-19). So far, so postmodern. The novel also signals its precursors through a series of epigraphs from Judith Butler[23], Susan Howe[24], Italo Calvino[25], Charles Simic[26] and Hélène Cixous[27].
While funny, the zanier moments are not the strongest part of this 120-page novel. De Marcken is also capable of switching into surprisingly beautiful and surreal descriptions – for example, when the zombies, who do not need to breathe, go “wading”, which involves wandering around the bottom of the ocean.
Much of the novel is written in a fragment-heavy style that recalls post-Raymond Carver[28] minimalism:
Exit 74. West because west is the direction of leaving behind. West because west is the last resort. I go west because west is where I remember you.
This style is effective and economical, but De Marcken is also capable of gnarled and dense descriptive language that draws on different traditions:
Up ahead the road doglegs sharply south and then west again, and just the way that an eddy at the bend in a river traps leaves and dead fish and snakes and trash, at this bend in the road there is a blue-tarped gyre of trailers, Blue Bird school busses, reefers and boxcars, algae-streaked motorhomes and mildewed park models all rafter together and piled in between with rusted frames and mossy shells of cars and trucks.
The rambling nature of this gorgeous long sentence formally mimics its own central metaphor: it slowly collects the detritus of post-apocalyptic civilisation, just like the bending river traps waste. You can see the influence of writers like Dennis Johnson[29], Marilynne Robinson[30] and even Cormac McCarthy[31] in the lengthy clauses, the nouns that have become verbs (“doglegs”, “rafter”), and the unexpected convergence of archaic and modern language (“a blue-tarped gyre of trailers”).
Parts of the second half of the novel might be in dialogue with McCarthy’s The Road[32] (2006). One section appears to invert perhaps the most infamous scene from that novel, depicting a mother-figure who is slowly feeding herself to a zombie child.
The novel concludes with a brilliant series of Beckettian set pieces – think Happy Days[33] – that vacillate between body horror and physical comedy. These sections are absolutely its high point.
Like Tell, It Lasts Forever is not a novel that innovates linguistically, but it is deeply unusual. It is hard to get purchase on because of the way it moves from the absurd to the disturbing and grotesque, incorporating finely observed natural details and even earnest expressions of lost love. It is a testament to the novel’s oddity that the protagonist’s decision, early in the novel, to place the dead body of crow inside her empty chest cavity seems wholly in keeping with the narrative.
Anne De Marcken.
Giramondo
Read more:
Homemade and cosmopolitan, the idiosyncratic writing of Gerald Murnane continues to attract devotees[34]
The memory of a memory
After reading Tell and It Lasts Forever, I thought of the music-reviewer turned experimental novelist David Keenan’s famous definition of what he called “hypnagogic pop[35]”: music that was “refracted through the memory of a memory”.
Like that music, these novels present an ambiguous nostalgia for a postmodern experimentalism whose meaning remains unclear. Are they pushing forward new and uniquely contemporary literary approaches? Is that even a thing still worth doing, or simply a hangover from a long-dead modernism?
Or are these hypnagogic novels, intentionally repurposing older experimental techniques in slightly different ways that reflect a broader sense of exhaustion and inertia (which, in the case of De Marcken’s novel, is literally post-apocalyptic)?
Or are they something else altogether? Aside from a few specific details, they feel like they could have been written at any point in the past 40 years
This ambiguity is the source of their power. Whether or not these novels are “new”, they are truly strange. I am grateful that in the post-apocalyptic, post-Amazon world of 2024 we still have publishers willing to support books like these. More weird books, please!
References^ new sincerity (en.wikipedia.org)^ metamodernism (www.thelivingphilosophy.com)^ late postmodernism (www.researchgate.net)^ autofiction (theconversation.com)^ recent reflection (publicseminar.org)^ The Cultural Turn (www.versobooks.com)^ Novel Prize (giramondopublishing.com)^ Tell (giramondopublishing.com)^ It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (giramondopublishing.com)^ Giramondo (giramondopublishing.com)^ New Directions (www.ndbooks.com)^ Fitzcarraldo Editions (fitzcarraldoeditions.com)^ Cold Enough for Snow (giramondopublishing.com)^ The responsibilities of being: Jessica Au's precise, poetic meditation on mothers and daughters (theconversation.com)^ Odd Number (www.goodreads.com)^ Summertime (www.textpublishing.com.au)^ My Last Duchess (www.poetryfoundation.org)^ Bad art friends – Jen Craig may be the best Australian writer you've never heard of (theconversation.com)^ I Am Legend (en.wikipedia.org)^ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (en.wikipedia.org)^ Warm Bodies (en.wikipedia.org)^ Madame Secretary (www.imdb.com)^ Judith Butler (theconversation.com)^ Susan Howe (www.poetryfoundation.org)^ Italo Calvino (en.wikipedia.org)^ Charles Simic (www.poetryfoundation.org)^ Hélène Cixous (egs.edu)^ Raymond Carver (www.poetryfoundation.org)^ Dennis Johnson (www.poetryfoundation.org)^ Marilynne Robinson (en.wikipedia.org)^ Cormac McCarthy (theconversation.com)^ The Road (www.panmacmillan.com.au)^ Happy Days (en.wikipedia.org)^ Homemade and cosmopolitan, the idiosyncratic writing of Gerald Murnane continues to attract devotees (theconversation.com)^ hypnagogic pop (en.wikipedia.org)
