THIS BOOK IS THE LONGEST SENTENCE EVER WRITTEN AND THEN PUBLISHED

A writer explores his struggles with mental illness and the death of his father in this experimental memoir composed of a single run-on sentence.

The premise is quite simple: Cowen set out to write and publish the longest sentence ever in the English language without stopping to edit it along the way. The sentence quickly becomes a diary of sorts in which the author explores some of the pressing concerns of his life, including his perceived failures as a writer, his struggles with bipolar disorder (a condition he shared with his father), and his father’s recent suicide. “I haven’t been processing my grief the way I wanted to yet about my dad’s death,” writes Cowen when the subject initially rears its head, “and I’ve been wanting to write something about my dad, and his dad and me and maybe also my dad’s hero, Abraham Lincoln, as he is also said to have been mentally ill at times, or at least a melancholic.” Along the way, the author delves into the history of really long sentences, from William Faulkner and James Joyce to current world record holder, Jonathan Coe (Cowen checks in periodically to see if he’s beaten Coe yet), and similarly long-winded writers. The author also examines other figures suffering from bipolar disorder, like Kanye West, and any other bits of popular culture that stray into his mind. The book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that veers from critical commentary to myopically metafictional sections about the process of writing the sentence: “Recursivity is something I have been doing with these commas, and the ands, and the whiches, and which is like this, and that is a recursive clause right there, and this is one, too, see they are pretty cool, you just put them in, with a comma, like so.” As an Oulipo-style experiment in form, the volume is certainly an impressive feat, particularly in the way Cowen manages to weave in discussions of mental illness and mania. That said, it’s obviously an acquired taste, and there are portions where the project begins to feel inevitably redundant. But those who stick it out will find that they have a new relationship not only to English syntax, but to the peculiar workings of the human mind as well.

An ambitious and striking comment on art, sanity, and human endeavor.