Macdonald, Rowena. “From Old Analogue to Nervily Digital.” Review of Unwords by Andrew Gallix and No Judgement by Lauren Oyler, The Irish Times, 23 March 2024

Andrew Gallix is an Anglo-French writer who lives in Paris and set up 3:AM Magazine, one of the first online literary magazines, in the year 2000. Unwords is a collection of essays but is also, as he explains, “not the book I wanted to write”.

The book he wanted to write was a work of criticism started in 1990, for which he got a publishing contract, but which remained unfinished because he couldn’t perfect the manuscript to his liking. “I wanted my book to contain not only multitudes, but everything.”

This “phantom book” haunts the pages of Unwords and the theme of unwritten books, unreadable books and books that attempt but fail to contain the whole of experience (as all books are doomed to do) is revisited throughout along with writers who stop writing, writers who “do not feel the need to publish in order to affirm … their status”, “writers who take their time; writers who take their lives … writers who vanish into their writing” or “who vanish into thin air”.

Unwords includes witty, accessible essays on French philosophers (Barthes, Sartre et al), French and English underground culture and the experimental authors that 3:AM has championed, alongside phenomena such as prank pie-throwing, hauntology and spam literature. Towards the end it includes personal pieces on Gallix’s time as a punk in New York, an elegy to lost childhood/Guy the Gorilla and a moving letter to his late mother.

Gallix is at heart a modernist and has little time for middlebrow, well-made novels by careerist “professional” authors. For me the most inspirational character in Unwords is Albert Cossery, the Egyptian-born writer, who died in 2008 aged 94, and who lived in the same Left Bank hotel for 63 years, did not bother to get a day job and instead subsisted on the royalties from his eight novels and followed the same radically lazy daily routine: “Every day, he got up at noon (like his characters), dressed up in his habitual dandified fashion and made his way to the Brasserie Lipp for a spot of lunch. From there, he usually repaired to the Flore or the Deux Magots where he would cast an Olympian eye over the drones passing by. Then it was time for his all-important siesta. Repeat ad infinitum”.

Neither London nor Paris allows writers to be so lackadaisical nowadays. Unwords may not be the Gesamtkunstwerk that Gallix wanted to write but the erudition contained within is remarkable, and yet it has a charming light touch.

So, to Lauren Oyler’s No Judgement. If I came to Gallix warm, as I’m familiar with 3:AM Magazine, I came to Oyler cold, having never heard of her. …

Gallix is a gentle melancholy guide, more analogue, older, European; Oyler is nervily digital, younger, very American in sensibility despite more than a decade in Europe. …

Unwords and No Judgement reveal the world views of two equally clever authors; are you in the mood for encouragement towards intellectual discourse, or confrontation?