Captain's Log: Fosse / Murdoch

Odds and ends on "The Other Name," "A Fairly Honourable Defeat," and "The Rehearsal"

Photo by Michael Fousert on Unsplash

The Other Name, the first two books of Jon Fosse’s Septology, shouldn’t really work; it’s a stream of consciousness novel about a painter driving from rural Norway to the city to do some shopping, and then driving back home, and then doubling back to the city to check on a friend. In the field of day-in-the-life stream-of-consciousness books, Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway loom tall, so in general you don’t seem ‘em too often these days. You don’t see much of the modernist mega-novel’s ambition these days either, which is why something like Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (thousand page stream of consciousness book without sentences or paragraph breaks save for a couple sections narrated by a mountain lion) made such waves in 2019. The totalizing drive of the modernists - to try and capture everything that goes through our minds during an average day - has been replaced by a sort of resignation that the world can’t be contained within fiction, and that the world has changed so completely that only fragments can make up the whole, a connecting of Eliot’s Nothing with nothing to make a shattered whole. Think Renata Adler in Speedboat, then Elizabeth Hardwick doing it better in Sleepless Nights, on through the minimalists of the 80s, brief break for the mega ambitious novels of the 90s and early aughts - Foster Wallace, Franzen, the ‘hysterical realism’ of Zadie Smith - and now back to the fragmentary novels of Jenny Offill - no good - and Patricia Lockwood - very good - and the cold, removed third person of Sally Rooney - no good - and the cold, removed first person of Rachel Cusk - very good. This is a tidy summary and ignores many outliers on both sides (fragmentary novels during boom periods of modernism, and vice versa,), but hey, this is just a vibes-based appraisal, and this is all to say that the rigorous experimentation of Fosse’s book is swimming against the current these days.