Wittgenstein's Mistress

David Markson

I gave up on it. I understand its appeal for many, and it's probably the best example of what stream-of-consciousness would look like written down in first person by someone with an obsessive mental editor, but that as a convention doesn't hold up for as many pages as this novel wants to be. It would have been a great plotless short story, though. The narrator's voice rings true, if somewhat grating, like reading the two-hundred-fifty page rough draft of a meandering Andy Rooney column. And that's its major problem, it never centers on anything. There's nothing for the reader to latch onto and follow, other than the voice.

Other reviewers have commented on the novel's originality, and I was never quite able to find it. Those who thought it original for being a first-person last-woman-on-earth narrative are encouraged to go read, well, any number of last-person-on-earth sci-fi works. Those who found it in the narrator's existential angst are encouraged to check out Alain Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers and Jean-Paul Sartre's Roads to Freedom series of novels. Those who thought it original for being a whole novel told from the single perspective of an unreliable narrator can turn many places, most notably the work of James Baldwin, to see influences. In any case, I missed the originality.