Tripticks by Ann Quin

Tripticks Reviews

• 
  Paul

  This is the first time I have read anything by Ann Quin: she was a British experimental artist who took her own life in 1973 following years of mental ill-health. She wrote four novels and this was the last and most experimental. She was part of a very loose group of experimental writers including B S Johnson, Eva Figes, Alan Burns and Rayner Heppenstall.
  She is not much read today but she has influenced many other writers, including Kathy Acker, Juliet Jacques, Stewart Home, Deborah Levy and Chloe Aridjis.
  The plot is very loose and the narrator is male with three ex-wives. He is taking a sort of road trip across the US. He keeps coming across his ex-wives in all sorts of locations: usually his first ex-wife and she crops up most often. Various older family members also pop up in odd places and there are epistolary episodes as well. This has been compared to Burroughs and Quinn’s landscape is just as surreal. If you didn’t know the date you could easily date it by the references to fashion, TV, by the language and attitudes to sex and sexuality. The account is rather scattered and broken, jumping around a great deal. When a phrase like pre-punk aesthetics is applied to a work you pretty much know what you are going to get! It certainly wasn’t liked by the critics, look at what the TLS had to say:
  “The technique, which must be even more laborious to employ than it is to interpret, cannot perform what it aims at. The thing is still physically a book, we must still turn over its pages, we still have to remember from one page to the next what has accumulated. The effort of doing so through the thickets of frustration that the method and layout interpose is too much, and draws fatal attention to the powerful underlying humourlessness of the whole thing”
  However there are other views:
  "a savage assault on an America obsessed by commerce, advertising and media, a road novel from hell, written as if it is the frenzy of one last gasp"
  Of course it is a road novel of sorts and a pursuit narrative, but in some ways these aspects are almost asides to the encounters with various aspects of early 1970s American culture. There is also a good deal of free association and stream of consciousness digressions. This isn’t light bedtime reading, it is quite hard work. The more perceptive will also notice the influence of Marcuse. Quinn expects a lot of the reader, but she was the same in real life as her friend Alan Burns recalls a public literary meeting:
  “she did her Quin thing, that is to say she came onto the stage and she just sat and looked at people, she wouldn’t say a goddamn word! She just stared, she either implied or she actually stated that … we can communicate more in silence than with someone actually putting the words across.”
  Quin chops things about pop-art style and there are lots of illustrations from Carol Annand. You get the words of Nixon or Johnson juxtaposed with ads for erotic underwear or inserted into family history as in this instance where the narrator is talking to an ex father-in-law:
  ‘He was all for reconciliations, and while slicing through a neatly tiered 3-layer cake – more like a marble cake full of unexpected whorls and inseparable blendings – he exclaimed: “I do not think that those men who are out there fighting for us tonight think we should enjoy the luxury of fighting each other back home.”’
  The quote at the end is from a TV broadcast by Johnson in 1966.
  I can’t say that I was passionate about this and I think I would enjoy her first novel Berg more, but it is memorable and I know people on here who would love it. It is an acquired taste.
• 
  Nate D

  If you come filled with dreams, it may happen that your dream changes about every 15 minutes. The most is yet to come.

  
  
  This would have been the perfect road-trip reading, had I known about it one month ago. As it is, this indeterminate landscape of exercise crazes, seedy motels, and Joshua-tree ringed hot springs is all too familiar. And though we never made it to Phoenix, I feel like Robert Altman was aiming at the same America seen here when he made O.C. and Stiggs.
  
  Something I read had lead me to believe Ann Quin would be super-dry avant-garde opacity. In fact, her final novel is hysterical, a certainly experimental but dagger-witted rampage across an America burning with sex, consumerist bloat, and roadside attractions, deftly rendered in lists, statistics, and various cut-up interruptions derived from advertising, pulp blurbs, and brochures. These interruptions, which often occur mid-paragraph and with no warning besides a sudden disappearance of the first-person 'I', can make this a little confused at times I suppose (rumors about difficulty), and tends to garble the elegance of the prose a bit (none of these extra-story sources possessing Quin's own command of language, of course) but the technique really works. How better to present a universe being systematically brainwashed by television and 70s search-for-self culture. It takes a little adjustment, but once you get it, it really works, becoming more fun and readable than alternate dystopian road-novel
  Flet, for instance, and I liked Flet. It certainly seems more tightly directed than the Burroughsian cut-ups of Naked Lunch.
  
  

  Eerie rites greet the morning sun. He kneels on the floor grasping a small wheel with both hands and slowly prostrates himself. On a roof not far away someone runs on a treadmill. The president of a dressmaking company puts on a belt that sends electric shocks to his abdomen, while his wife stands with one foot on a four-wheeled board and the other foot on another four-wheeled board reverently squatting and rising, while their daughter lies head down on a slanted board, jerking convulsively at the waist. Sauna belts to sweat into. Executive Barbells to swing. Tensolators for building up muscles; vibrator massage machines ('both centrifugal and percussive action') and roller massage machines ('for deep-penetrating massage') treadmills and rocks and vibrating belts and electric bicycles ('Do your story dictation aboard a Trimcycle'). Tone-O-Matic weighted belts - belts weighted with 10 pounds of lead and intended to be worn in the normal course of a day's activity. One man cried that his hands were getting bigger and bigger.

  
  
  The actual plot is pretty simple: our protagonist and apparent embodiment of his times is on the run from his No.1 X-wife, their paths crisscrossing so that they often end up at the same motels, where our (anti)hero can peer through the keyhole at X and new lover doing naked yoga together or whatever (he's jealous that she never did naked yoga with him of course). In the process, various pulp-inflected scenarios play out and the protagonist mulls over his three failed marriages, jumping in time and through a long epistolary section (perhaps he has brought his letters with him in order to re-read. Again, it's a little garbled and uneven at times, but it seems true-to-subject and a perhaps natural result of reminiscing and channel surfing at the same time).
  
  The book is also notably interspersed with images seeming traced from collaged ephemera of the times: advertising circulars, noir scenes, sex, superheroes, random details of faces and objects. These come as rythmic interuptions that pace out the action, mirroring motifs and themes without ever actually illustrating. The technique works, I think, another sub-hum of the major information hum continuously barraging the story.
  
  Anyway. This was great, and I'm totally excited to read more Quin. A shame this was the last thing she wrote before swimming out into the ocean and disappearing at age 37.
• 
  MJ Nicholls

  No. Not at the moment. No thanks. I read B.S. Johnson’s corpus. I read Gilbert Sorrentino’s corpus. I read choice cuts from the butcher’s slab of postmodernism. I have limits. I cannot read this surrealistic cut-up who-the-fuck-is-narrating-this parade of amusing but aimless and tiresome non sequiturs for more than forty pages. I don’t care how cool it sounds. Or if the novel is a masterpiece of “pre-punk aesthetics” that helped out Kathy Acker. Or if there are groovy illustrations. Not at the moment. No. Freaking. Thanks. I have a several hundred orphanages of unloved strange fiction to read. I can’t love them all. I am not Mother Theresa. For one, I don’t think contraception is the Devil’s Business. Second, my middle name is not Gonxha. Call me a wet fish. But that’s the lowdown. I cannot commit right now. I am sure I will marry at some point and speedily divorce, leaving my X-wives strewn across American highways and a semi-drowned poodle in tow. But not now. These paragraphs with their lists and sentence fragments and surreal (don’t you cringe at that word?) imagery do not have a place in my literary purview. No. P.S. I once recommended Aberration of Starlight to Knig-o-lass to growls of disapproval. This is her revenge. Thanks. I’ll return this one by express mail.
• 
  Paul Dembina

  Very much of its time (the "swinging" 60s/70s) Quin utilises the cutup technique popularised by Burroughs, often to comic effect
  
  Although there's not much of a coherent plot, my favourite section is the epistolary one which was quite funny.
• 
  Sentimental Surrealist

  Comparing authors to other authors is both a natural and a dangerous thing, natural because (some) people like to read and draw connections between things, dangerous because that's insanely reductive, especially when you're going to compare a female author to a male one, since female authors have been reduced in our society to either writers of YA dystopia or romance writers. And yes, there are counterexamples, women writers who have gotten out of this particular ghetto, but who's the general public more likely to know about? Marilynne Robinson or Stephanie Meyer? Clarice Lispector or Danielle Steele? The point being, everyone's all "Burroughs Burroughs Burroughs" with this book because it's all cut-up, and yeah okay I detected a Burroughs influence too, but look: while I can't deny the lacerations Naked Lunch made on my 21-year-old soul, I like Tripticks more than Naked Lunch (to say nothing of other Burroughs... I mean, the self-repeating Nova Trilogy? The parlor trick Dead Fingers Talk? Tripticks all the way). And Berg. Maybe more than Quin's other two novels, too, but I'd like to actually read those two before I bandy this about as the peak of Quin's career.
  
  Here's what you need to know about Tripticks: a man who has had three wives is fleeing his first, who pursues him with her Satanist hippie boyfriend. He, like Berg, has a weird Oedipal thing so overblown and comical that I have to take it as a parody of weird Oedipal things (Alexander Portnoy can go jump in a lake) that also extends to the family of the first ex-wife. None of these characters are ever named. Throughout the novel, suburbia and consumerism and the American Dream are skewered alongside Freudian analysis (which seems to be the only mode of psychology literary critics will acknowledge, but that's a rant for another day), pictures are interwoven with the text, bizarre sexual fantasies play out, scenes are cut to and from without warning, personal correspondence is read from, conventions of the thriller are bashed to pieces, and the line between fantasy and reality is blurred as paranoia and entropy increase. If this seems like the ingredients of an avant-garde classic - Gravity's Rainbow, say, or Naked Lunch - that's because this would be marked as such if this had been written by a man. I'm convinced of it. I am utterly and completely unwavering in my belief that Ann Quin's gender is the only reason why she remains largely forgotten today.
  
  I mean, this book now has 40 ratings. Forty. And it's everything a fan of avant-garde literature could possibly want: laden with surreal humor, paranoid as fuck, chronologically jumbled, and yet still, in possession of a narrative, albeit a distorted one whose actual reality is difficult if not entirely impossible to discern. Yet, despite this, Quin's work has been buried. She has no role in the discourse, no place in literary history beyond a footnote consisting of "oh yeah, and Berg. Berg was fucked up." Well, guess what, literary world? You blew it, this is inspired madness. This is, in places, a satire of the complacent suburbs and in other places a satire of a satire of the complacent suburbs, not to mention the blows Quin strikes against misogyny via her narrator's boundless sexual appetite and lack of any accountability. All magnificently contorted onto itself in a weirdo mobius strip.
  
  Read it, basically.
• 
  Christopher

  In which Quin reviews herself:
  
  "The talk quick, sharp, clever, a dazzling display of brilliance which indeed was remarkable, and enormously pleasurable; but it left me numb, as though I had been spayed. I was unable to respond; a desperate competitiveness around me what could I say that would justify an interruption to all the verbal glory? Finally it was all simply too diffuse. I could understand if I were made to feel it...An attempt explicit, ardent, heroic perhaps, though at best only half successful-to perform the most necessary task: to connect the past with the future." (175-6)
  
  I feel that if I had read this at a different time, I would have appreciated it more. Like after some long conventional novel.
  
  Some of the language is fantastic, but the writing proceeds in such a manic, fractured propulsion that it almost reads as a long string of non-sequiturs. But that's not fair. There's certainly a focus, perhaps even a nucleus as the epistolary section reveals. And there's another level of meaning that emerges from the female author writing the male central "anti-protagonist" perspective so well.
  
  You don't need to be a thrice divorced hippie to work here, but it helps.
• 
  Joey Shapiro

  Absolutely WILD and I loved it!! Very clearly a huge influence on weirdo post-modern punk lit like Kathy Acker's Blood & Guts In High School with the way it employs illustrations and lists and sudden shifts in form (there's a whole section of 40 pages that are made up of letters from various characters to the protagonist). Really piercing, caustically funny attack on American values and consumerism that, more than any previous Ann Quin book, feels of a piece and consistently great from beginning to end. In its own way it's her most narrative-driven book but the narrative is totally surreal and askew and chaotic, like Quin's mind is going in seven directions at once and she (somehow) found a way to communicate all these conflicting thoughts on the page. Her most freaky, unhinged novel and definitely her best. :,)
• 
  Chris

  This is not the type of book, I suppose, that someone should read for entertainment. Then, though, I wonder what one should read it for. It is incredibly dizzying in its use of language, and the form is bizarre. This can be read as "this is a difficult book to read", but it also goes well with feelingsof paranoia, alienation from the self and various other things that modern American life seems to create for its inhabitants. So often, I was not sure where the tangent the story had gone on was actually at, but it didn't distract from the droning, isolating central theme of people out of control because they're oversexed, bored, and otherwise unable to do anything useful in the world they live in.
• 
  David Peak

  This is Ann Quin's masterpiece.
• 
  S̶e̶a̶n̶

  
  2.5
  
  This was probably pretty noteworthy when it first appeared in 1972 but it failed to excite me in 2015. The near-nonexistent narrative and the jumpy prose used to spin it out left me bored and confused. I did find the epistolary interlude at the midpoint to be helpful in adding weight to the narrative and this section was the most enjoyable to read, but still only tentatively so. Had there been a little more narrative and had the prose occasionally stood still for more than a nanosecond, I might have been right there with Quin. The critiques of post-WWII American culture were no doubt razor-sharp at the time but no longer seem so bold after this long. If anything they are merely a reminder of how little has altered in our course toward a numbed oblivion.
• 
  Tuck

  ya gotta love novels with poodles (right? you do?) this is a fairly hardbitten look at conspicuous consumption, of things, lovers, family. and jet setting too. i didn't know the author was gone now. too bad, really.
• 
  Will

  I'm honestly surprised that I made it through this novel. It's an incredibly opaque ramble. And while there were passages that grabbed me, and I appreciate the mixed media and subversion, the whole experience felt like a not-so-pleasant challenge.
  
  I like Quin's writing. It's replete with dry observations on the banality of American consumerism and chauvinism. At its most accessible, certain passages remind me of lyrics from Dry Cleaning songs. And sometimes it's satisfyingly weird ("I thought in terms of cartoons, each frame changing. I wore bold-textured high-riding slipons and appeared to others all mood and pauses and long stretches of languor.” 44.). I also like its inherent critique of "On the Road," which Quin separately described as "a lot of sentimental rubbish and [] tedious [in] how it goes on and on in this phoney pseudo ‘isn’t life crazy but it’s life man’ sort of fashion."
  
  But spread across 192 pages, the writing and its message wane. There isn't a clear narrative. Perhaps that's the point; but it also makes the reader less invested in the novel. In its middle third, it pivots into a series of letters to the protagonist (an unnamed man) from his mother, father, ex-wife, and lover. Because of the relative accessibility of that section, I enjoyed it the most. I honestly can't really recall, or at least easily describe, the rest of the book.
  
  "Tripticks" feels dated. The version I read is in Courier New--a font I associate with the 1960s and old fogey counter-culture. There are doodles mixed throughout the novel that reinforce that feeling. (Interestingly, the illustrations were added after the book was accepted for publication, and thus are kind of squeezed into the existing layout). Another reviewer commented that the book was "probably pretty noteworthy" when it was published, but not so much now, which felt right to me.
  
  For a parting positive note--the book reminded me of another book that I enjoyed more, but never finished: Ducks, Newburyport. Both are stream-of-conscious and somewhat opaque. Ducks is certainly longer--thus, I never finished it. But, perhaps it's time I picked it back up . . .
• 
  Chris Oleson

  Wild, crazy, unfettered story whose plot is basically incoherent and irrelevant. Oh, there's a plot (of sorts) but the fun doesn't come from that.
  
  This last novel from the mid-70s from Ms. Quin before she committed suicide reminds me Beckett, Acker, and Burroughs and other outrageously experiemental, post-modern writers from the 60s and 70s whom I've completely forgotten. The writing is fun and self-indulgent and exasperating and literary and revolutionary and "out-there." It is writing that one experiences rather than comprehends.
  
  Success or failure is irrelevant for such works of art or literature.
• 
  Kristal

  This was difficult for me in the same way Burroughs is difficult for me- I’m not good at following the chaotic dada stream of consciousness. If you’re into that, this would probably be a treat!
• 
  Geoffrey

  ...sorry, but it just isn't enough. God knows I WISH Quin's final statement was some sort of transcendent masterwork, but it ain't happening. I love all kinds of avant-garde fiction, but it has to be, um, good. In spite of a few vaguely amusing moments, in the main this is just tedium personified, with a desperately self-conscious attempt at writing in a hip, "American" idiom.
• 
  A.D. Jameson

  One of my favorite novels.
• 
  Elliott James

  "A large group of men sat in a circle on the kiva roof, where a ladder leading into the kiva itself made two spires against the darkening sky. How unlike those iron stairs of the subway; the turnstile a symbol of authority, a meter of the capitalist system, a regulator of human movement, a metal-petalled flower of law and order. And like hell I was part of that system that turned men into well-fed and well-cared for pigs only interested in consumption and excretion. But secretly bearing the image of death-devoted Tristan - a modern day existential hero who is haunted by a world he can neither take nor leave."
  
  If I am being honest, I didn't really enjoy the novel; however, that text toward the end is worthy of praise, so for that I give Ann Quin five stars; such a beautifully written passage.
• 
  michal k-c

  Finished just before the new year… nice. My second Quin - firing from the hip here but I feel like her experiments fall just shy of greatness, though this one was definitely a fun read. Sometimes a novel can be a collage. I think that should be the goal of any ambitious experimental writer; crater towards a more forgiving regime of book.
• 
  Dan Freeman

  Very challenging to stay with, I gave up about 2/3 through. I wish there’d been more of a thru line to help navigate this fever dream.
• 
  Kick Holland

  Enjoyed the epistolary segment most, as it produced far more empathy for all of the characters involved. Book was cold and wry, some very clever images, but generally too aloof for great connection.
• 
  Tom

  A book from the British literary avant-garde circa early 1970s that hasn't aged terribly well: one part Burroughsian surrealism, one part Modernist steam-of-consciousness, two parts non-stop attack on American-style consumerism/militarism (bracing then, ho-hum now). If you like the Beats, Modernism, and/or late-'60s/early-'70s-era peace/love/drugs vibes, "Tripticks" has them in spades, but I can't say that Ann Quin displays a voice or sensibility that's strikingly unique or insightful.