Vanishing Point

David Markson's Vanishing Point is a novel assembled from notecards. Its central figure is an elderly writer known only as "Author," who sets out to turn shoeboxes full of index cards into a book. As he does, the pages fill with a steady stream of anecdotes and revelations about the trials, calamities, absurdities and sometimes outright tragedies that come with a creative life. Author insists he is trying to stay out of the story. He does not manage it. Even while he steps aside to let the material speak, he remains the undeniable center of the book, and the narrative eventually pulls him into its own opening and devastating climax. The book is the latest in a run of experimental novels from the author of Wittgenstein's Mistress, Reader's Block, Springer's Progress and This Is Not a Novel. It is a novel about death and about laughter in equal measure, and it is dense with intellectual richness for readers who enjoy a form that breaks from conventional storytelling.