Will Alexander

I picked up this short book thinking it would be perfect reading to accompany me on a trip of a day or two. Boy was I wrong. It's short, but each sentence is so dense and fecund that careful reading and rereading--always rewarded--become necessary, a process that took more than the few hours on trains I had imagined would be sufficient. The transparent style--the words and the manner in which they are organized are not important and should be ignored; only the "message" matters--has become such an overwhelming presence in prose that we forget what an artist as skilled as Alexander can do with words, that there are styles other than the transparent that give the mind a welcome workout. Alexander, who must be read with a dictionary at hand--and he misuses none of the arcane words in his vocabulary--constantly yanks our attention back to the language of which his art is made, and at the end of the experience that Diary as Sin is, we are grateful to him in the same way we are grateful to a challenging poet. The imagined monologuist at the center of the tale, who speaks the novel into tapes, does the same thing, and the tale this blind and brutalized woman creates is a monologue that stands with the masters of this form: Beckett and Bernhard. Will Alexander is a major artist too little known.… (mer)