Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0030203414 ISBN 13: 9780030203411

Publisher: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977

Here comes Lucien Springer. Age: forty-seven. Still handsome though muchly vodka’d novelist, currently abashed by acute creative dysfunction. Sole preoccupation amid these artistic doldrums: pursuit of fair women. Springer is a randy incorrigible who is guided by only one inflexible precept: no protracted affairs. And thus he has slyly sustained eighteen years of marriage.

Enter, then, Jessica Cornford. Age: almost half of Lucien’s. Lush of body and roguish of mind. Whereupon what begins as bawdy interlude becomes perhaps the most untidy extramarital letch in literature.

Rabelaisian yet uncannily wise, both ribald and bittersweet, Springer’s Progress is that rarest of gifts, a mature love story. It is an also exuberant linguistic romp, a novel saturated with irrepressible wordplay and outrageous literary thieveries. Contemplating his own work, Lucien Springer modestly restricts his ambition to “a phrase or three worth some lonely pretty girl’s midnight underlining.” For the discerning reader, David Markson has contrived a hundred of them.

About the Author:

David Markson's novel Wittgenstein's Mistress was acclaimed by David Foster Wallace as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country." His other novels, including Reader's Block, Springer's Progress, and Vanishing Point, have expanded this high reputation. His novel The Ballad of Dingus Magee was made into the film Dirty Dingus Magee, which starred Frank Sinatra, and he is also the author of three crime novels. Born in Albany, New York, he has long lived in New York City.

Review:

"Alive with the pleasures of language . . . terribly funny, formidably intelligent, and curiously compassionate." -- Jonathan Yardly, Washington Post Book World 7-1-77

"An exuberantly Joycean, yes, Joycean, celebration of carnality and creativityan everything-goes, risk-taking, maniacally wild and funny and painful novel . . . brilliant." -- New York Times Book Review 4-29-90

"Funny and intelligent and, to say the very least, sexy." -- Mademoiselle 9-77

"Marvelously bawdy . . . but what stands out finally is the finely honed prose of a writer with a rare wit." -- Library Journal 8-90

"This freewheeling celebration, this dancing wordplay . . . delights the mind as well as the ear. A truly marvelous read." -- The East Hampton Star 6-7-90