Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson, is an experimental novel about the last human being on the planet. It is devoid of a story in any traditional sense, being more a fictional woman’s meditation on the intertextuality of culture, where Helen and Paris and Vincent Van Gogh have just as much—if not more—reality than the woman’s dead husband and dead son. It is a collection of her thoughts, typed into a typewriter that she found in an empty house on the beach where she resides. While the thoughts sometimes build upon one another, much in the same way Wittgenstein’s thoughts build upon each other in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the fact of the woman’s decades-long solitude and her open admission that she sometimes goes mad ensures a certain play to the tensity of her logical chain. There are a few facts in her world, but the details belonging to those facts are often blurred, lost, ignored, or as with the name of her son, deliberately forgotten. The book has no narrative arch; the character has few desires, having long become resigned to her solitude; and outside of trying to remember certain facts or explain certain thoughts, there are no conflicts to drive what little action the book contains. Despite those hurdles, however, the novel is satisfying to read: Markson’s experiment works.

The first reason the novel works is the conceit. The narrator is the last person alive on the planet, and what’s more, she is the last living animal on the planet: she doesn’t even have a cat or dog to keep her company. Markson never explains what happened to the world. The closest he comes is in a meta-fictional moment, when the narrator is contemplating writing “an absolutely autobiographical novel that would not start until after [she] was alone, obviously” (230). The narrator continues, “Which is to say a novel about somebody who woke up one Wednesday or Thursday to discover there was apparently not one other person left in the world” (230). Because Markson withholds this information, one’s curiosity as to how this whole thing began all but ensures that the reader reach the end of the book, even if, in the end, the narrator can only offer a reason that is emphasized by the term “apparently.”

The second reason Wittgenstein’s Mistress satisfies is because of the style that Markson uses. Almost every sentence is followed by a paragraph break, and the next sentence often contradicts or expands upon the previous sentence; when it doesn’t, it often contradicts or expands upon a sentence or idea that came several pages earlier. It does so relentlessly. The effect makes it very difficult for one to find a “comfortable” place to stop reading. This must be experienced to be understood:

I have just walked out to the pickup truck. / Actually where I walked was to the spring, which the truck is next to. I went for the pitcher, which is how I think of the jar. / Before bringing it back I emptied it out and filled it again, since the water had already turned warm from standing in the sun. / The water at the spring itself is always cool, however. / I have brought in lilacs also. / It is Joan Baez, I believe, whom I would like to inform that one can now kneel and drink from the Loire, or the Po, or the Mississippi. / Winters, when the snows come and the trees write their strange calligraphy against the whiteness, sometimes the only other demarcation is that of my path to the spring. / Well, and in the opposite direction too, of the path that I follow through the dunes to the beach. / Although I am completely forgetting the third path, just in back of the dunes, which still another that can be seen at such times. / That third path is the path to the house that I have been dismantling. / Perhaps I have not mentioned that I am dismantling a house. / I am dismantling a house. (76-77)

The third reason Wittgenstein’s Mistress works is because the narrator has a dry wit that is oftentimes laugh-out-loud funny, and in her more lucid moments, she is able to provide striking insights into various cultural figures, myths, and legends. The humor in the novel is difficult to include in an excerpt, building as it does sentence by sentence and across several dozen pages and topics, until she’ll use one fragment to connect three or four topics at such a surprising and delightful angle that one’s roommate will be forced to ask, “What are you laughing at?” An example of her striking insights can be excerpted, however. The following is from a tangent about painting portraits of her mother and father for their thirtieth anniversary:

I painted the portraits from slides, meaning the gift to be a surprise. / What this made it necessary to do was to hang dropcloths in my studio, so as to contrive a dark corner in which I could make use of a projector. / Generally I seemed to spend more time walking in and out of the darkness, than actually painting. / To tell the truth, what I generally spent the greatest amount of time doing was sitting, than actually painting. / At times one can sit endlessly, before getting up to add a single brushstroke to a canvas. / Leonardo was known to walk halfway across Milan to do that, with The Last Supper, even when anybody else would have believed it was finished. / Which did not keep The Last Supper from beginning to deteriorate in Leonardo’s own lifetime, however, because of a foolish experiment he had tried, with oil tempera on the plaster. / In a manner of speaking, one could even say that The Last Supper was already deteriorating while it was still being painted. / For some reason that thought has always saddened me. (68)

Wittgenstein’s Mistress is not an easy read. It demands a reader who has the patience to suffer a narrator who continually goes back on what she says, an author who seems to willfully prevent the development of any overarching crisis, and an allusive style that may be 97% bullshit. But thanks to its curious conceit, its short sentences and fragmentary thought processes, and its remarkable humor and heart, David Markson’s experimental novel does not fail to satisfy those who have the patience to sit quietly and await the silence that will mark the end of the world.