THREE

Before Quin died in 1973, an apparent suicide at 37, she published four novels in her native Britain, but only two in the States, including this, her second book, which Brian Evenson claims in a new introduction is an innovative masterpiece, despite its nonlinear, collage style with its run-on, unpunctuated sentences. Kirkus had a less sympathetic view in 1966, when this “morosely inbred” novel first appeared. “Close, cryptic, neurasthenic” is how we characterized this experimental narrative about three characters who do very little. “Resourcefully intuitive” readers might enjoy the verbal meanderings here since Quin, we thought, “prefers the symbol to the direct statement.” Kirkus considered her an “expert” at capturing the “reproachful, edgy, nasty” atmosphere, which is “just as unpleasant as it is intended to be.” In other words, for aficionados of the transgressive.