THE SOLITARY TWIN is on one level a fantastic tale about the denizens of an odd fishing town (but who more resemble the quirky ensemble cast of a three-act set in an upper-west-side drawing room) but by the end, mathews’ language, which feels at times like disembodied style itself, snaps the constellation of fantasy together into a truly oedipal lightning strike of anger and grief, artificially constructed and yet real… it’s a stunning novel and you should feed it to your mind.
one doesn’t read harry mathews for his perspective on labor. there are several economic fables in this work from a barely ironized, capitalist pov (michael bloomberg even makes a cameo). and yet i forgive entirely this near total lack of evolved class consciousness. that’s not to say this doesn’t muck things up at times — for example, here, in an oddly flat and sometimes ridiculous section about May ’68. and yet this unworldly worldliness also gifts mathews with extraordinary ability to punctuate narrative habits and be singularly voluptuous with language. stories are baroque with interwoven details, astonishingly placed, and with deep zings of psychological observation.
no doubt there are hidden machinations behind the scenes, oulipian blackbox hijinks. how else can you manifest a patina of defamiliarized idioms like “I remember the whole beginning — it was a seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong” (105). and yet i prefer to remain generally ignorant of the work’s constraints and simply ride the thrill of the normalized unexpected to its deracinating conclusions… ashbery called THE SOLITARY TWIN harry mathews’ finest novel — and it and CIGARETTES are def my personal contenders for the title.
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Harry Mathews obituary in the New York Times.
Daniel Levin Becker’s appreciation in the San Francisco Chronicle.
2007 interview with Mathews in the Paris Review.