Author Archives: andrew gallix

All-Consuming

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W. J. Davies reviews Loren Ipsum in the Times Literary Supplement, 7 August 2026, p. 44:

Andrew Gallix’s debut novel, Loren Ipsum, is all-consuming. It has devoured modernism, postmodernism, punk and Paris, and regurgitated it all in a perplexing and compelling send-up of the contemporary Anglo-French literary scene. Writers are being murdered, some in the streets, others in locked rooms where they must explain, gun to their heads, why they write. What the killers want is largely unclear: their slogans and ideas are constructed from the linguistic mysticism of Adam Wandle, an elusive author whom the English journalist Loren Ipsum is researching for a book. Whether or not Wandle is in league with these terrorists is by the by, as is, frankly, the whole plot.

The novel’s set-up is an excuse for Gallix to canter merrily through a series of vignettes satirizing a cast of literary types with pun-stuffed prose. Chapter thirteen, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Talk”, is one of the peaks, filled with the dialogue of people speaking past each other at a literary party: “Are you an author? Should I have heard of you?”; “When a novel is described as ‘deeply humane’, I reach for my gun”; “At some point Anne Carson and Lydia Davis must have merged. It’s the only explanation”; “I only read books in translation”; “I was the first book blogger, you know”; “It’s always spelt ‘premiss’ in the TLS. Always”. It is pitch-perfect. In an interview with Gerry Feehily in 3:AM Magazine, of which Gallix is the editor-in-chief, the author remarks that he finds himself in the kitchen or sitting out of the way at parties, taking everything in, but struggling to join conversations. Difficult as that may be, this habit of observation has fine-tuned his ear for the excruciating nonsense most of us are at risk of producing. For anyone with even the merest literary pretensions, Gallix has your number.

Loren Ipsum is one of those invigorating novels that leaves you feeling smarter and more foolish. For every allusion you recognize, ten more have zipped by unnoticed. In a nod to T. S. Eliot’s mischievous endnotes in The Waste Land, Gallix’s “Acknowledgements” are a list of references running from James Joyce, Eliot and Samuel Beckett to contemporary authors such as Toby Litt and Gallix’s publisher, Sam Mills (who also appears in the novel), plus literary journalism, critical essays and more. Like everything in Loren Ipsum, this list is full of gaps. Even Loren is not always fully there, named as she is after placeholder text. “She was all blurred features and radio static.” Who she is, and what she really wants, is both one of the novel’s central mysteries and entirely beside the point. If that premiss sounds irksome, this novel will do you good.

Patisserie Terrorism

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Noël Godin, the infamous Belgian patisserie terrorist, has died at the age of 80. In 2011, I wrote the following piece for the Guardian:

Jonathan May-Bowles (aka Jonnie Marbles), who attacked Rupert Murdoch during yesterday’s phone-hacking hearing, has all the makings of a formidable flan flinger. In his capacity as comedian-cum-activist, he embodies a kind of Platonic ideal of patisserie terrorism – that strange interface between slapstick and protest.

Pie-throwing as a political gesture has its roots in the Groucho-Marxism of the 1960s student uprisings and, more specifically, in the prankish happenings of the Yippies. Tom Forcade, the founder of High Times magazine, is usually considered to have perpetrated the very first political pie crime in 1970. Aron Kay, who came to be known as “The Yippie Pie Man”, followed suit, covering countless politicians and celebrities (including the mayor of New York City and Andy Warhol) in cream, between the late 1970s and early 1990s. Yesterday, he allegedly posted a message on a website giving his full support to May-Bowles: “Murdoch definitely needed a pie, for sure.” However, it was a Belgian anarchist who really put “patisserie guerrilla” on the map. One could argue that he even managed to turn it into an art form.

In the late 60s, Nöel Godin was, among other things, a film critic who amused himself by reviewing movies he hadn’t seen or that didn’t even exist. Georges Le Gloupier, a fictitious film director (invented by his partner in crime Jean-Pierre Bouyxou), made regular appearances in these reviews.

In 1969, Godin wrote that Le Gloupier had been so outraged by Robert Bresson‘s latest film that he had felt compelled to chuck a “Mack Sennett-style” pie smack in the director’s face. In a sequel, he went on to describe how the French novelist Marguerite Duras had avenged the initial “creamy affront” by giving Le Gloupier an impromptu pastry pasting while he was dining out in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. “Madame,” said the biter bit after licking his frothy chops, “I prefer your patisserie to your novels.”

Through some quirk of fate, the publication of the second article coincided with Madame Duras’s arrival in Belgium on a promotional tour. This proved a godsend to Godin, who decided to give a final twist to this burlesque saga. He ambushed the prime exponent of the “empty novel” and treated her to a real custard pie this time round. A visiting card was nestling in the incredible, edible weapon. It read: “With the compliments of Le Gloupier.”

The seminal Duras drubbing provided a blueprint for all the subsequent pie attacks. A few months later, it was choreographer Maurice Béjart‘s turn to fall victim to a Chantilly crime. By that time, Le Gloupier had acquired all his distinctive features: the refined dinner jacket and bow tie of gentleman-burglar Arsène Lupin, the false beard and spectacles of a cartoon, bomb-throwing anarchist and, last but not least, the absurd “gloup! gloup!” mantra. In the time-honoured tradition of Galatea, Pinocchio and sundry gingerbread men legging it after rising from the pastry board, Le Gloupier took on a life of his own: he started popping up all over the place, unbeknown to his creator, who was often associated with attacks he had taken no part in, but was only too willing to take credit for.

According to Godin, a well-aimed pie can break through the victim’s public image and lay bare his true character. New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, reacted in good-humoured fashion and refused to press charges. By contrast, Bernard-Henri Lévy reacted violently and was flanned on at least five occasions as a result. The vendetta against the pop philosopher turned into a running gag in France.

The movement probably peaked in 1998, with the pieing of Bill Gates. Godin had now become a celebrity in his own right, and was frequently invited on live TV shows to be pied by presenters he had himself pied. The whole thing was descending into farce. However, the website of Godin’s “Internationale pâtissière” continues to advertise the latest pie attacks on a monthly, and sometimes even weekly, basis. The pieing of Murdoch could well be the sign of a revival.

Jonathan May-Bowles still has a thing or two to learn, though. A plateful of shaving foam is no substitute for the real thing. Godin once told the Observer: “We only use the finest patisserie ordered at the last minute from small local bakers. Quality is everything. If things go wrong, we eat them.”

Antediluvian Texts

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Delighted to discover that Dennis Cooper‘s “Spotlight On … Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel (1963)“, posted on 3 August 2026, opens with an old essay of mine. The link is here.

‘David Shields recently dismissed most contemporary novels as “antediluvian texts” that “could have been written by Flaubert 150 years ago”. “In no way,” claimed the author of Reality Hunger, “do they convey what it feels like to live in the 21st century.”

He has a point — albeit one that Alain Robbe-Grillet had already made in 1965 when he deplored the fact that young French novelists were praised for writing “like Stendhal” but castigated as soon as they refused to abide by the “dead rules” of a bygone age. Along with Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon – the main proponents of the new novel (nouveau roman) – Robbe-Grillet stood resolutely in the second camp. In his essays, he returns time and again to the notion that the novel, from Stendhal to Joyce, has constantly evolved – hence the absurdity of using “the norms of the past” to judge the fiction of today. Far from representing a rejection of the past, the quest for a new novel was thus very much in keeping with the history of a genre which, by definition, must always be renewed.

Feeling that his work was too often misrepresented by the critical establishment (with a few notable exceptions including Barthes, Blanchot and Nabokov), Robbe-Grillet published a series of articles to set the record straight. In 1963 they were collected in Towards a New Novel – for my money, one of the most important works of postwar literary criticism. However, these “critical reflections” were never meant to constitute a manifesto. Every novel, according to Robbe-Grillet, is a self-sufficient work of art which cannot be reduced to some external meaning or truth that is “known in advance”. “The New Novel,” as he put it, “is not a theory, it is an exploration.” Why bother writing a book that illustrates a rule when “the statement of the rule would suffice”?

Quoting Heidegger at the beginning of an essay on Waiting For Godot, Robbe-Grillet writes that the human condition is “to be there”. In another essay, he states that it is “chiefly in its presence that the world’s reality resides”. So there you have it. Man is here, the world is there and the distance between the two lies at the heart of the new novel project. We endow the world with meaning (or meaninglessness) in order to control it. From this point of view, the writer’s traditional role was to excavate nature in order to unearth the “hidden soul of things”. Robbe-Grillet calls for the creation of a new form of fiction that reflects the “more modest, less anthropomorphic world” we live in today – one which is “neither significant nor absurd,” but simply is.

This seemingly anodyne observation has serious literary ramifications. Gone is the traditional hero of yore who believed the world was there to be conquered and whose hour of glory coincided with the triumph of individualism. Gone is the humanist “communion” between people and things: “Things are things, and man is only man.” Gone is the notion of tragedy, which Robbe-Grillet sees as a twisted ploy to reaffirm this solidarity: “I call out. No one answers. Instead of concluding that there is no one there (…) I decide to act as if someone were there, but someone who, for some reason or other, will not answer”. In the new novel, “Man looks at the world” but “the world does not look back,” which precludes any symbolism or transcendence. The novelist’s task now is to describe the material world, not to appropriate it or project himself onto it; to record the distance between human beings and things without interpreting this distance as a painful division. All this implies that the “entire literary language” be reformed. Similes and metaphors, which are often used gratuitously to confer literary status upon a text, are seldom innocent since they tend to anthropomorphise the world.

The new novel is routinely attacked for being inhuman and coldly descriptive. Robbe-Grillet responds that his work is in fact far less objective than the godlike, omniscient narrator who presides over so many traditional novels. Description here is purely subjective and takes centre stage, whereas in Balzac, for instance, it simply sets the scene by lending the plot an air of authenticity. Instead of referring to an external, pre-existing reality, Robbe-Grillet’s descriptions seem to create their own objects, their own hallucinatory reality. “Nothing,” he explains, “is more fantastic, ultimately, than precision.”

The reality of any work of art is its form, and to separate style from substance is to “remove the novel from the realm of art”. Art, Robbe-Grillet reminds us, is not just a pretty way of presenting a message: it is the message. Like the world out there, a novel is self-sufficient and “expresses nothing but itself”. Its “necessity” has nothing to do with its “utility”. Whenever an author envisages a future book, “it is always a way of writing which first of all occupies his mind,” which leads Robbe-Grillet to state – provocatively – that “the genuine writer has nothing to say. He has only a way of speaking”. Creative writing classes should always start and end on that note.

The Rhyl Deal

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Just a few thoughts upon reading Tom McCarthy‘s forthcoming The Rhyl Poster.

Tom McCarthy’s The Rhyl Poster is, in my opinion, one of his very best novels to date, like a Graham Greene rewritten by DeLillo with a little help from Ballard.

Remainder, his debut, opened with a reference to Simon Critchley’s work. His latest book is actually dedicated to the philosopher (who was also McCarthy’s one-time partner in crime at the International Necronautical Society).

At the outset, a taxi accidentally exits a car park through the entrance, thereby producing a remainder — “a surplus piece of paper” — in the shape of a ticket that preserves its potentiality by remaining in abeyance: “the unsurrendered ticket, paper scrap that had purloined itself, slipped through the architecture of the system it was meant to serve”. There are other similar intervals — interregna — in the novel where the order of things is subtly subverted. Benjamin Stanton, the protagonist, argues that the time of law (he is a legal expert) is in fact an aporia, “the gap, the interval, the instant of suspense” that escapes time. His strange stutter remixes his speech so that the ends of sentences come first (his sentences exit through the entrance). He is depicted at home “hand and Pilot Falcon pen suspended above a rectangular sheet” of white paper — a suspension which is the very space of literature: “Stanton found himself placed in an interval, a stretch of time that, once vacated, turned into a magnet for events”. The ur-hiatus, however, is the eponymous, and recurring, image of the Rhyl poster — that of a worker (later likened to an actor playing the part of Hamlet) on a cigarette break at a railway station, who has removed a poster from a hoarding and is yet to replace it with a new one. This hesitation between palimpsest and blank canvas, as well as the worker’s temporary désoeuvrement (the incompletion of his task, which is reminiscent of the incompletion of the ticket’s cycle) open up a space of creative freedom.

Exiting through the entrance: The Rhyl Poster is, among so many other things, a compendium of McCarthy’s favourite themes: slightly menacing bureaucratic environments (here, the Court of Justice in Strasbourg), simulacra (copies without originals), terrorism, realism, metaphor (what things — Weapons of Mass Destruction, for instance — really stand for), time, incest, entomology, voices piped in from elsewhere, speech impediments, geometry, archaeology, conceptual art, not forgetting loops, cycles, and webs. There are new themes too such as the world of video games or the “zombie half-life” of the UK now that it has “unplugged” from the European grid.

Benjamin Stanton’s origins (he is a foundling) and even nationality (he claims to have taken on Irish nationality) remain shrouded in mystery. We know that he is a veteran of the war in Iraq and is now a star référendaire at the European Court of Justice. After meeting a shadowy figure called Pirotti, who is at the head of the Centre for Juridical Collaboration, Stanton becomes a double agent: “To sweep the old order away and bring the new one in: didn’t this task call for an outlaw, for an act of violence?” Possibly under the growing influence of the little blue pills Pirotti has introduced him to and to which he becomes addicted, he sets about composing his “great counter-confession” — a demented Gesamtkunstwerk, a “universal grammar” that, he prophesies, “would do nothing less than lay the groundwork for the founding of a whole new order”. I’ll stop there — no spoilers about the ecstatic, apocalyptic denouement.

From time to time, we need to be reminded that Tom McCarthy is one of the best and most important writers of the 21st century. The Rhyl deal.