So far, so impenetrable - but let’s take a different tack. While the parable of the gown ends, once again, without evidence of my wife. Buried nightdresses, whether diseased or in pieces, find considerable favour in chronicles of a more Teutonic sort. Tin knives and burnt blankets, a plague gate. What delicate phrases we must, therefore, do without. The parable of the bed - I imagine the Bible contains no such item. This, for instance, is a typical passage: To take one example, Schwartz’s narrator cryptically claims that “some Colonial maps display rows of daggers for fenceposts, and rows of cannons for houses.” Later he remarks - apparently at random - that “maps of the body, in early anatomy, display the organs as houses in a town.” Now, imagine a book built wholly out of such statements a map that collates other maps - of history, culture, and literature - and then madly scrambles their landmarks. The book is a baffling accumulation of folklore and apocrypha, convincing fictions and far-fetched facts. John the Posthumous articulates an alien linguistic world, woven together from Biblical quotes, opaque legal cases, and allusions to Winslow Homer’s paintings - not to mention eighteenth-century conduct books, histories of the French monarchy, and the floor-plans of abandoned properties (that’s just to begin with). Whatever the metaphor, this sort of writing frustrates some fundamental assumptions about the consolations of fiction. Or maybe it’s more like a dream - one whose meaning can’t be translated back into waking language. But Schwartz’s work shrinks from the world, like a whirlpool, pulling us down to a depth from which nothing returns to the surface. Usually, we’d like novels to leave us with a better understanding of ourselves a better idea of where we belong in the world. Our literary traditions train us to want certain “returns” from the task of reading. His prose puts readers in a position where the most rudimentary aspects of reading are no longer givens, but goals. In this respect, Schwartz’s writing spins the reading experience into reverse. Instead, as with crimes or conspiracies, plots can be something we try to discover - with no certainty of success. Rather, John the Posthumous reminds us as readers that plots aren’t reducible to what we can describe. Put bluntly, this book will beat any critic’s attempt to boil it down to a summary.īut it doesn’t follow from this that the book has no plot. John the Posthumous is impossible to synopsise. At an elementary level, reviews are expected to be about what books are “about.” And this is precisely where Jason Schwartz’s new novel poses a problem.
Such a review might climb to all sorts of interpretive heights, but still, a basic part of its job is to summarise its subject’s plot. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.Ĭonventionally, a review of a novel should offer some sort of synopsis.
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