A Trippy, Dazzling Experience

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Susan Finlay has reviewed Loren Ipsum in the September 20025 issue of ArtReview, p. 108:


In publishing, “lorem ipsum” refers to Latin dummy text traditionally used by a designer as a placeholder, inserted prior to setting the author’s actual words. For Anglo-French cultural critic Andrew Gallic, it’s (almost) the name of his debut novel’s British-born, Paris-based protagonist: the titular Loren Ipsum, a pretty, middle-class Observer journalist with ‘white teeth and a raspberry tongue’ researching a reclusive writer, Adam Wandle — although we don’t discover either that this is why she has come to France, or indeed Wandle’s name, until page 90. What we do know, however, is that members of the international literati are being murdered by anti-bohemian terrorists with a penchant for slogans that, it later transpires, have been culled from Wandle’s back catalogue.

Since Wandle, and Loren herself, exist, primarily as a conceptual pretext, the delayed reveal matters little. In keeping with the metafiction Gallix has previously championed, such as works by Tom McCarthy and Lars Iyer, Loren Ipsum‘s focus is on how stories are constructed — through multiple viewpoints, direct addresses to the reader or ‘characters’ who acknowledge their fictional status — rather than on the story itself.

Consequently, the novel’s many flamboyant cameos and stand-ins appear determined to blow up the fourth wall. For anyone familiar with Gallix’s oeuvre and social media presence, it’s soon apparent that much of Wandle’s biography overlaps with his own (although for those who aren’t, it isn’t); Loren bears a a striking resemblance to Gallix’s real-life partner and publisher Sam Mills, and Mills also features as a separate ‘character’ (though there’s seemingly little distance between her on- and off-the-page personas), as does her crime-writer nom de plume, Lily Samson.

It’s absurdly nepotistic, but absurdity and nepotism are the point. In giving equal weight to his own professional associations as he does to dadaist poet Arthur Cravan, academic Toby Litt, musician Richard Hell and actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, among others, Gallix draws attention to the conflict between the author’s desire to create meaning and the universe’s apparent lack of it, via a world of endless dinner parties and tasteful reprints. This, plus allusions to the counterculture ‘canon’ (think Tel Quel to The Ramones) and avant-garde art, makes Loren Ipsum a trippy, dazzling experience, reminding one of the excessive possibilities that reading, as well as writing, offers.


Fellow Travellers

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Richard Clegg. “An Antidote to Smug Insularity.” Review of The Threshold and the Ledger by Tom McCarthy, Bookmunch, 8 September 2025:

“Before reading Tom McCarthy’s latest literary excursion, I skimmed my notes on Unwords (Dodo Ink) by his literary fellow traveller, Andrew Gallix, the founder of 3:AM Magazine. These two quotations brought to the fore the key aspects of their endeavour: “Replication (read realism) cannot grasp the essence of things,” and, “Written books are sweet but those unwritten are sweeter.” Both writers like writing about imaginary authors, but not yet a modern day Keats. Both have fought a guerrilla-struggle to widen the scope of English fiction. They seek asylum on the European continent, not near Dover. They are serious but comical too.

…Where Gallix strays towards the French, McCarthy veers towards the Greek and Germanic. They form a necessary coalition against the anti-experimentalists who sometimes seem to dwell in a cave of obscure Victorian novels.” 

Tom McCarthy and me, Shakespeare and Company, 2022

Autumn Picks

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Author and librarian Stu Hennigan chooses Loren Ipsum as one of his 5 autumn picks in The Bookseller:

Andrew Gallix is one of the great unsung heroes of the UK literary scene, through his almost two decades fearlessly and tirelessly platforming bleeding-edge new writing as editor of the legendary 3:AM Magazine, and his reputation as an astute, perceptive and incisive critic (as collected in last year’s Unwords). His debut novel is a wild literary thriller in which ‘the death of the author’ is repeatedly taken too literally, as a nihilistic terrorist group slaughters the writers of France for reasons obscure, and a British journalist, Loren Ipsum, becomes embroiled. You’ll need to be on your toes to keep up with this one.

Le Hareng Rouge

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A short chapter from Loren Ipsum, entitled ‘Le Hareng Rouge’, appears in Minor Literature[s]. 

The elements were leading him a merry dance. The wind, in particular, was winding him up. He paused to remonstrate with his umbrella, which seemed to have developed a mind of its own since blowing inside out. Its erratic movements resembled those of a divination rod gone haywire. Buffeted on all sides, the man gripped the shaft with both hands, holding on for dear life. Oh, the gusto of those gusts! Loren pictured him soaring away like Mary Poppins — an unlikely prospect in view of his corpulence. Besides, the disjointed canopy lay presently in a puddle at his feet. The man gazed ruefully at the carnage of twisted ribs. Turning his chubby face skywards, he closed his eyes for a few seconds while the righteous rain streamed down his hirsute features. Ah, those rivers of rivulets! Whether he was communing with God, steeling himself for the next stage of his pilgrimage, or simply weathering the weather, Loren knew not. In fact, he was adrift on a vulva-shaped rowing boat in the middle of a fjord, sailing into darkness. The kind of absolute darkness where you can see the light, if only you look hard enough. And there it was, shimmering in the distance, and he was tingling all over and everything everywhere was growing luminous and numinous. He was alive. Right now, he was alive. Drenched — but alive. It was pouring and he was porous; part of everything. Never again would he take existence for granted. He resolved, there and then, to spurn the dead hand of stultifying routine and seek out the spiritual in the everyday. So he beat on, borne back ceaselessly onto the ground he had just covered, but eventually inching forwards through hard-won incremental triumphs. At a glacial pace, he thus contrived to travel the length of the bistro from whence Loren, transfixed, had observed the whole saga. This, she thought, is what happens when nothing happens. Nothing was happening before her very eyes. …

Triangle of Happiness

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Sam Mills, ‘Interior Worlds.” The Carbon Arc, edited by Richard Skinner, Vanguard Editions, 2025, p. 91:

‘Triangle of Sadness is a film I’ve seen many times, though I only have a clear memory of the occasions I’ve seen it with Andrew Gallix. We watched it in the Curzon and more recently on Netflix, sitting in his flat in Paris, his sofa draped with a large cloth with a map of London printed on it, a symbol of wistfulness for the country he misses. Ever since we connected during the pandemic, films have played a part in our relationship. I would not have watched classics by Bresson or Tati without him. In turn, I introduced him to Östlund, to Force Majeure and The Square.’