Clear the pipes!

For a century now, in pursuit of a more convincing representation of the swirling rhythms of the mind, authors have been tempted to do away with one of the building blocks of fictional convention – almost the defining feature of the great Victorian novel. But there is an obvious risk in going chapterless. What if the reader, all at sea, simply gives up?

Even when buoyed by the thought that what is difficult might be good for us, or that not all fictional experiments are fanciful French imports, there comes a point when the brain gets tired and wants a break. Forced to shove a bookmark in, mid-flow, readers will find the illusion of psychological realism is broken anyway, just like old vinyl records that have to be turned over halfway through a symphonic movement. And you can’t really start where you left off. What might have seemed immersive can end with much heaving and sighing.

Two new novels plunge the reader into chapterless waters. One writer is American, one English, and each, it so happens, traces the mental turmoil of a grief-stricken disaffected male academic.

All My Precious Madness, a debut novel by Mark Bowles, takes us into the head of an Eng lit teacher at the (fictitious) American College in London. His story can be briefly told: he was brought up in a working-class family in Bradford, with an overbearing, occasionally violent father with whom he nevertheless shared an undemonstrative affection. At school he quickly got into fights and earned the unlooked-for respect of the local bully; yet he made his way to Oxford, where he was surrounded by reminders of the class divide (the first words he heard from his neighbour were “pitted olives are for lazy people”). He failed to finish a thesis, spent ten years debasing himself for a telesales company populated by typically blokeish geezers, during which miserable time his father died, and eventually finished a thesis at Birkbeck before moving to his current teaching job.

We learn this information piecemeal, as the narrative voice switches around, leaping in time, pushed and pulled by various themes, diverted – in fact, directed – by rants against the idiocy of the modern world and its idiot inhabitants. Satisfyingly sweary (“fuckweasel”) and prone to tirades, the narrator lambasts everything from travel (selfie sticks; “experiences”) to coffee shops (“sloppy lattes”, but also poncey baristas enthusing about “really interesting bergamot and watermelon notes”). It is not all negative. The book includes occasional epiphanies – like the night spent alone in a bookshop, “exempt from time and harm” – and a fair bit of excitable digging away at philosophical paradoxes. Anger, though, predominates.

Our narrator is especially sensitive to inane phrases (“end product”, “value proposition”), which lead him to violent fantasies against the guilty utterer. Indeed, violence lies in the bedrock of this novel, and the whole vagrant spew of opinion leads to a very real punch, which then releases a virtuosic torrent of emotions, culminating not with the affirmative Joycean gasps of “yes I said yes I will Yes”, but with the more rebarbative “Fuck off”.

The writing is pitched nicely, only occasionally lapsing into overfamiliar material, more often eliciting an approving readerly chuckle. But it is a long journey, consisting of large chunks of prose segmented into unindented paragraphs, with occasional extra divisions (a thin grey line), but nothing so assistive as a chapter. Thus, what begins as an entertaining bit of spleen eventually has the reader checking for the exits as the narrator bangs on and on about what’s wrong with everything.

Smartphones, coffee and swearing are also central to Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins, the author’s third novel. The narrator teaches humanities, or did until recently, at a community college in the US. In similar fashion to Bowles’s narrator, he rants about the idiocies of modern life, the smartphone and its little notification alerts, the disgusting slop that passes for coffee. Much of the book is taken up with qualities of different beans and roasts, and the awesome power of the Nuova Simonelli coffee machine. He recalls accusing his wife of social deviance for wanting sugar in her coffee.

This narrator cannot bear the uninquisitive vacuity of his students and is trying without success to finish (or start, really) his magnum opus on Montaigne. He has got as far as forever changing the title, each attempt apparently revealing new insights. Lesser Ruins is full of these titular efforts, all of them atrocious. He has a son who is deeply involved in house music and who bores him to tears with the minutiae of artists, genres and recordings. Neither father nor son can deal with the main event, which is the mental decline, then death, of the narrator’s wife. The book switches back and forth in time – as does All My Precious Madness – in this case between marital reminiscence, current woes and a semester spent at an artists’ colony, where the narrator failed to make much of Montaigne’s diary, but became obsessed with the work of a sculptor who was creating, from imagination, the unsculpted works of artists who had died in the Holocaust.

Haber’s novel is lyrically written, often amounting to prose poetry. There are no paragraphs, let alone chapters, though the whole is divided into three parts, each taking 70–100 pages in one gulp. As with Bowles’s book there is a violent culmination, this time in the form of an explosive outburst of the coffee machine, concealed beneath the narrator’s classroom desk, leading to the final ejection from a place for which he had already lost all respect. (This is not a spoiler.) The writing is fluent and compelling, often rhapsodic, with a cumulative power to its repetitions, but the non-directional nature of it, the relentless circularity of thought, is a significant challenge, with no real promise of reward for the reader other than the sense of being trapped in a troubled mind.

Montaigne also banged on about himself, especially his thoughts and thought processes, but it was Virginia Woolf who identified that, beneath the wonderfully chaotic detail of the unstructured Essais, over many hundreds of pages, lay the “overmastering desire to communicate”. The broken narrators who enunciate the novels of Haber and Bowles, by contrast, find little desire to communicate with the idiotic world in which they find themselves, and they have little to convey beyond their frustration and bitterness. Both narrators, as it happens, are interested in expression: one has written a thesis “On the Notion of Expression” (“now a received work of reference on the subject, as far as I’m concerned”) and the other believes the key to Montaigne is the soul’s expression. Yet both, through their long, unchaptered wanderings, express nothing but the mind in disarray, out of tune with itself.

At the end of both novels, however, comes a moment of recognition and release. In an epilogue to All My Precious Madness, the narrator is startled to find that it is not violence but unspoken love that has caused him such mental torment. And it is only on the final page of Lesser Ruins that the narrator can recite his wife’s name, accessing a grief that had been concealed for fear of its immense power. There is no promise of happiness in either case, but the purgatory appears to be over.

Are the experiments sustainable? Will the ordinary (unpaid) reader make it to shore? One of the more friendly French imports might help here. Near the end of his life, between 1978 and 1980, Roland Barthes delivered a set of lectures later collected as La Preparation du Roman I et II (2003; The Preparation of the Novel, 2011), in which he analysed with his usual quirky flair the process of novel-writing in all its elements, starting with the haiku (naturally) and taking in a variety of writing environments and authorial choices. This was also what Barthes wrote in lieu of an actual novel.

Similarly, these novels trace the sound of voices that cannot achieve proper expression, the sound – voluble, it turns out – of blockage. They are pre-novels. If they flow, it’s the flow of a burst pipe – spilling out, but not going anywhere helpful. And while it might be too much to read into a couple of new novels, it is interesting to think that our age of self-expressive verbiage – with its ocean of self-yelp books – might rest on a similar condition of blockage, of emotional regression, rather than the expression of any real kind of self. The relief one feels when these well-written but relentlessly involuted novels end is as if they had been written to illustrate – at dangerously effective length – the profound absence of that one quality essential to true self-awareness and, indeed, its expression: silence.

Hal Jensen is writing a book about the Oxford Professors of Poetry

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