Andrew Gallix is an Anglo-French writer who lives in Paris and set up 3:AM Magazine, one of the first online literary magazines, in the year 2000. Unwords is a collection of essays but is also, as he explains, “not the book I wanted to write”.
The book he wanted to write was a work of criticism started in 1990, for which he got a publishing contract, but which remained unfinished because he couldn’t perfect the manuscript to his liking. “I wanted my book to contain not only multitudes, but everything.”
This “phantom book” haunts the pages of Unwords and the theme of unwritten books, unreadable books and books that attempt but fail to contain the whole of experience (as all books are doomed to do) is revisited throughout along with writers who stop writing, writers who “do not feel the need to publish in order to affirm ... their status”, “writers who take their time; writers who take their lives ... writers who vanish into their writing” or “who vanish into thin air”.
Unwords includes witty, accessible essays on French philosophers (Barthes, Sartre et al), French and English underground culture and the experimental authors that 3:AM has championed, alongside phenomena such as prank pie-throwing, hauntology and spam literature. Towards the end it includes personal pieces on Gallix’s time as a punk in New York, an elegy to lost childhood/Guy the Gorilla and a moving letter to his late mother.
Gallix is at heart a modernist and has little time for middlebrow, well-made novels by careerist “professional” authors. For me the most inspirational character in Unwords is Albert Cossery, the Egyptian-born writer, who died in 2008 aged 94, and who lived in the same Left Bank hotel for 63 years, did not bother to get a day job and instead subsisted on the royalties from his eight novels and followed the same radically lazy daily routine: “Every day, he got up at noon (like his characters), dressed up in his habitual dandified fashion and made his way to the Brasserie Lipp for a spot of lunch. From there, he usually repaired to the Flore or the Deux Magots where he would cast an Olympian eye over the drones passing by. Then it was time for his all-important siesta. Repeat ad infinitum.”
Neither London nor Paris allows writers to be so lackadaisical nowadays. Unwords may not be the Gesamptkunstwerk that Gallix wanted to write but the erudition contained within is remarkable, and yet it has a charmingly light touch.
Lauren Oyler is right that “performing trauma has now become a safe strategy in art”
So, to Lauren Oyler’s No Judgement. If I came to Gallix warm, as I’m familiar with 3:AM Magazine, I came to Oyler cold, having never heard of her. Googling revealed she is American, has written Fake Accounts, an autofiction novel, and is semi-notorious for a vituperative LRB review of Jia Tolentino’s popular essay collection Trick Mirror. The cover of No Judgement describes Oyler as “dangerous”, “unafraid” and “combative”.
Reviewing her feels like going into battle. Well, here goes: No Judgement is six long, dense, twisty, subtle essays on gossip, vulnerability, autofiction, criticism, anxiety and Berlin (where she lives and that is now the cheapish playground for many international creatives; Albert Cossery would live there if he were young now).
Oyler is ferociously intelligent and none of her many judgments is easy. She pushes arguments beyond the expected resolution into an original spin on the initial premise. Her essay on corporate co-opting of “the power of vulnerability” is funny. Her unapologetic elitism is bracing. She is right that “performing trauma has now become a safe strategy in art”. Confessional literature can be boring. “Conventional novels” containing characters with lives that are different from the author may not push the form further.
However, like Joyce Carol Oates, I sometimes find autofiction to be “wan little husks” and am wearying of the diaristic offerings of writers with similar angst to mine. Her Berlin essay is the most enjoyable, not only because I can relate to it – a concept Oyler might find basic – as I have been there many times, but because it has some tenderness. I know exactly that “almost nauseating nostalgia” of living in an iconic place but wishing I could be “in the moment” back in an earlier time when I experienced my home city more “authentically”. That essay opens the collection into a broader world and is a meditative moment in an otherwise frenetic read.
Gallix is a gentle melancholy guide, more analogue, older, European; Oyler is nervily digital, younger, very American in sensibility despite more than a decade in Europe. She pummels you with verbose certainty. Yet her prevarications and justifications suggest she is less certain and, indeed, more vulnerable than she admits. Unwords and No Judgement reveal the world views of two equally clever authors; are you in the mood for encouragement towards intellectual discourse, or confrontation?
