I am often asked which of Gerald Murnane’s novels readers should start with, but there is no easy point of entry (my suggestion, instead, is the short story When the Mice Failed to Arrive, which contains, in miniature, the major themes and techniques that he develops across his work). Responses to Murnane’s work often tend to extremes: many readers, like me, become obsessed, wanting to read everything he has written, while other readers remain bemused or puzzled or worse.
Murnane’s four final novels – Barley Patch, A History of Books, A Million Windows and Border Districts – are exemplary works of late style. The phrase was coined by Theodor Adorno, who notes that late style occurs when an artist’s “subjectivity” is so “ruthlessly proclaiming itself” that it “breaks through the roundedness of form for the sake of expression”. In this account, the artist eschews the formal perfections of their medium to explore, instead, idiosyncratic artistic desires.
