It is funny, perplexing, consistent and unusual, with all the characteristic Mathews obsessions. It may also be one of the best places to start enjoying his work ... In this and his other books, Mathews appreciates frauds and forgers, those who recognize the disconnect between who people are and who they pretend to be ... 'writing that cuddles up to the so-called truth but never pretends to be it'—a fine and memorable expression of the magic that happens when readers read good fiction, especially the good fiction of Mathews.
The Solitary Twin, released this month by New Directions, acts as coda to Mathews' idiosyncratic career — a short work that succeeds as both a career-end capstone and a final digression ... While this mystery surrounding the twins electrifies the book, the majority of this clever, protean novel is comprised of the stories told at dinner parties and meet-ups among new and old friends ... One cold eternal winter does not reign on a single page of Mathews' final novel because the stories continue, the digressions go on, and even though Mathews the man has passed away, Mathews the writer, the storyteller, continues — a now solitary twin.
...The Solitary Twin is the perfect endnote for Harry Mathews and a superb point of entry for new readers, encapsulating his lifelong commitment to formal invention while simply being an excellent novel in its own right, something anybody could pick up ... This is Mathews in a nutshell: constantly surprising, ever-revolutionary, subversive, and in perpetual search of possibility. His work is a reminder that everything in life can be conceived and experienced—but like John and Paul, the solitary twins, seldom in the same place at the same time. Above all, he was, like Geoffrey, proactive and insistent on two points in particular, namely that art is what exists between extremes. And that it is time to move on.
Mathews, who died last January at eighty-six, has given us a disarmingly gentle last act in which real conflict is absent for chapters at a time. Dialogue clumps together, with lines from different speakers snuggling in the same paragraph. The stakes seem low, even nonexistent, as when a character frets over whether her friend will know how to support a partner on the dance floor ... Or is Mathews up to something else? ... as the disconnected stories fuse into a shocking whole, and the true identities of certain characters come to light, a murderous, literally oedipal rage overwhelms the sanitized life of New Bentwick ...The ratcheting of the drama does feel sudden, but perhaps we’re witnessing a Scriabin-like late style, 'utter simplicity' masking 'mind-boggling complexity' ... Perhaps The Solitary Twin works best as a kind of jolly death pact, an unconscious and serendipitous collaboration between these two old friends-slash-dignified-weirdos. Ashbery’s line of praise, his only remark on a book in which 'John' proves to be a phantom, a crutch, a construct, reads like a knowing wink: 'I believe this novel is his finest.'
Like the films of Wes Anderson, the novel revels in its own whimsy, inventiveness, and odd detail ('…high-heeled black patent leather sandals; a flounced red taffeta skirt, half-calf length; a broad belt of green snake skin…'). Less interested in being a story about something, The Solitary Twin exudes a near-puritanical joy in just being itself ... The effect of all these stories folded into one another does suffuse the novel with a general flatness in tone. Like a Russian doll, then, the joy comes as much from the unpacking itself as what is unpacked. It’s fun to see how each story relates to one another, and how, as the novel develops, these connections grow more and more urgent, uncanny, and overdetermined. Mathews, like Borges and Barthe before him, places his readers in a playful postmodern conundrum, where first we lose track of the reality of the stories, then the reality of the storytellers, then the reality of the world they reside in, before ultimately axing the reality of the novel (which, of course, was illusory all along). By the book’s end — and after a final-hour shift in perspective — Mathews emerges firmly in charge, the last storyteller left alive. The Greek tragedy that befalls his characters, then, is not so much felt as it is appreciated, like an expert magician’s final trick or an improviser’s out.
The interconnected tales never grow into a conspiracy, given how expertly the distances between characters are calibrated. As a consequence, inexact doubles proliferate; altered versions of dinner party guests stumble home. As with much of Mathews’s writing, The Solitary Twin is a problem of numbers, which language resolves, or at least subdues with bubbling intoxicants. The town speaks as one out of many; the twins as many out of one.
Mathews’ story, with flashing hints of bedroom farce and Hitchcock-ian thriller alike, takes a few twists, sometimes digressing into interior yarns that seem to lose the thread until just the right moment; it’s a structural marvel, the product of a master at work. The novel is also perhaps the most accessible of Mathews’ later books, especially as it careens toward an end that is more reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith than Georges Perec. A smart, beguiling work elegantly written and with just the right leavening of sex—and violence.
The stories expose hidden ties between the participants, and Mathews joins in the fun, with the third-person narrator being unmasked ... As the novel circles closer to the grand reveal promised by its title, Mathews toys with the reader’s 'desire to resolve the irresolute, to conclude the incomplete, to have the crooked made straight.' The result is an undeniably clever parting shot from one of contemporary literature’s most playfully challenging writers.
