Wall by Jen Craig

“This novel gives the reader one of the best depictions of thinking in fiction that I have read in a long time” – Talking Big

"... combines exactitude and vagueness, immediacy and distance, to approximate how scatty, worm-like human thought might be represented on the page" – The Saturday Paper

“the skeletal frames of [Craig’s] narrative plots are barely visible beneath the roving stream of consciousness that encases them” – Sydney Review of Books

"Craig’s work constructs an idiosyncratic monologue …. that traces the thoughts of a London-based artist whose father, a hoarder, has died in Sydney" – Sydney Morning Herald

Such appreciations of Jen Craig's third novel testify to a distinctive remove from the default facility of the anglophone novel, with an incremental intensification of the narrative form taken in Since the Accident and Panthers and the Museum of Fire. However, I'm doubtful of the reviews' characterisation of Wall as a relocation of thought from mind to page, not only because the novel is presented as a letter, but also because it ignores the tension generated by inheritance that constitutes the novel in its basic plot content: between daughter and parents, anorexia and hoarding, the artist and the art world, and its form: the inheritance from literature, in which thought is already writing.

The reviews also testify to their own concern for inheritance. While the foreground purpose of comparing Jen Craig's prose style to that of David Foster Wallace, Henry James, Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, Gerald Murnane, László Krasznahorkai, Jon Fosse and Mathias Énard and, most commonly, WG Sebald, who voiced his own anxiety about literary inheritance, is to situate an author in a market bustling with reading choices, the background noise, made clear in the excess of the list, is anxiety about the value and meaning of art going forward, perhaps in the hope that the future of the novel lies in its past. It's no coincidence that a similar anxiety generates the narration of Wall. The purpose of the letter is to announce that its writer, an installation artist, has given up on making a version of Song Dong's installation (about hoarding) which had promised art-world success and thereby relief from the impossibility of completing an original installation (about anorexia) in recognition that, rather than in opposition, one is the correlate of the other. Without explicit awareness, we realise we are reading in a space outside of such possibility and impossibility; a space set aside from the ambition and despair, from success and failure, from value and meaning, from going forward; a space often shared by Thomas Bernhard's narrators, such as the two brothers in On the Ortler, recently translated in The Rest is Slander, which also takes the form of a letter. While the names listed are valid comparisons, this may be Wall's most significant inheritance, one in which the will contains the unthinkable.