TRIPTICKS

A narrator without much personality but plenty to say makes a dash across America in this postmodernist screed from the late and mostly forgotten stylistic rebel. British author Quin (Berg and Three), who died in 1973, gets another of her four novels resurrected to little purpose. Tripticks has a structure of sorts, in that it’s narrated by the same person all the way through. He’s on the tail of his “No. 1 X-wife,” who’s gone off with a younger man. The resulting journey takes him through an impressionistically rendered American landscape, which comes in for the usual ridicule. Quin does have a style all her own, that’s for sure. While her writing has little linear logic, and there’s a little too much cutting-and-pasting going on, her voice manages to speak quite clearly through the sly little quips, puns, and non sequiturs the narrator lobs off of every paragraph. And unlike those who would be her peers today in the realm of pomo literature, Quin doesn’t seem interested in shocking the reader with outdated ideas of the profane. A warm and funny talent gets lost in all the meandering—a talent that even the random illustrations slapped into the text are unable to enliven.

Might enjoy some interest from serious students and teachers of the avant-garde, but otherwise will probably sink without a trace.