David Markson obituary

Experimental US novelist who avoided literary safety nets
David Markson
David Markson was one of the most original of US novelists. Photograph: Johanna Markson/AP

David Markson, who has died aged 82, was one of the most original of US novelists. Kurt Vonnegut and Zadie Smith have written with saucer-eyed admiration of his fiction, while his Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) has been reprinted half a dozen times, after first having been rejected by a staggering 54 publishers. The American writer David Foster Wallace called it "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country". Markson's last four novels, Reader's Block (1996), This Is Not a Novel (2001), Vanishing Point (2004) and The Last Novel (2007), all walk a literary tightrope, without the usual safety nets of plot and character development, yet through some form of alchemy are compelling and oddly haunting.

Markson was born in Albany, New York, to Samuel and Florence Markson, a newspaper editor and a high school teacher. After serving in the US army from 1946 until 1948, Markson took his BA at Union College, New York, in 1950 and an MA from Columbia University in 1952, beginning a correspondence there with the novelist Malcolm Lowry, whose Under the Volcano (1947) was the subject of Markson's MA thesis and of his study, Malcolm Lowry's Volcano (1978). Markson became close to Lowry, who once stayed at Markson's flat in New York. Markson recalled how, left alone one afternoon, penniless and without a drink, Lowry downed a bottle of his aftershave.

In 1956 Markson married Elaine Kretchmar (now a successful literary agent). They spent 1958 to 1961 in Mexico, where Markson completed a draft of Going Down, his first serious novel.

Markson's first three novels, written between 1959 and 1965, were potboiling crime fiction. The Marksons' children, Johanna and Jed, were born in 1963 and 1964 and Markson needed to earn money for his young family. The Ballad of Dingus Magee (1966) began as a conventional western, but soon became a parody of the gunslinger adventure story. It was filmed in 1970 as Dirty Dingus Magee, starring a 50-plus Frank Sinatra as the teenaged Dingus, and was box-office poison. Miraculously, the rights had been sold for $100,000, which allowed the Marksons to live and travel in Europe for more than two years.

In 1970, Going Down, a piece of late modernist gothic and a miracle of allusive, non-linear narrative, was finally published. It sold only modestly, as did Markson's next novel, Springer's Progress (1977), a ribald but melancholy comedy about a married, creatively blocked middle-aged writer who has an affair with a young woman. As the story concludes, Springer breaks his writer's block by writing the novel we are reading.

Markson separated from his wife in 1982 and began a 10-year relationship with the painter Joan Semmel, to whom he would dedicate Wittgenstein's Mistress. In this plangent novel, a painter appears, by her own account, to have awoken one day to find that she is the only person in the world left alive. We begin to wonder whether she really is alone, or whether she has had a mental breakdown and just cannot see those around her. The novel maintains a balancing act between these two interpretations with immense skill.

At the end of the 1980s, Markson had bouts of serious illnesses, including both lung cancer and prostate cancer. By then in his mid-60s, he began to produce his most original work. The first and best of these books is Reader's Block, that rarest of beasts, an addictively readable experimental novel. An elderly, isolated writer considers composing a novel. How much of his own experience will his character have? This story takes up roughly 20% of the text. The rest of the novel is made up of short anecdotes about the lives of artists, writers and musicians. They tell of success, but more often of failure, madness, poverty and death.

But while we learn that Rossini, for instance, wore a wig, and two on cold days, or that Aristotle presumed that women had fewer teeth than men, we begin to realise that many of these seemingly unconnected stories begin to form patterns about deaths more serious than that of the individual, from Troy and the crusades to the Holocaust.

Markson's bleak but moving fiction runs against the grain of a generally upbeat US culture and is part of that great tradition of nay-saying American writing, which goes back at least as far as Herman Melville.

His marriage ended in divorce. Markson is survived by his children and three grandchildren.

• David Merrill Markson, novelist, born 20 December 1927; died 4 June 2010

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