Richard Clegg. “A Book with Meaningful Content.” Review of Loren Ipsum by Andrew Gallix, Bookmunch, 5 November 2025.

Prominent writers are being kidnapped and “executed” by terrorists who are convinced that bourgeois bohemians are the main obstacles to revolution today. Adam Wandle is a reclusive author who has been hiding out on the fringes of Paris. This is the plot but the plot isn’t everything in this novel. The novel is a companion piece to his critical book, Unwords, that covers prose fiction from Michel Butor to Jenn Ashworth.

It is brimful with puns, literary references, and exuberant humour, some sophisticated, some Carry On double entendres. Its elective affinities are as much with Beerbohm and Waugh as with Joyce and Proust. There are terrific lists of bands real or imagined and Chapter 13, a skit on book bloggers caught in a world of either/or that is neither moral or aesthetic, as far from Kierkegaard as it could possibly be. This isn’t a dummy text without meaningful content, a printing device that lorem ipsum means. It is a book with meaningful content.

If you like cryptic puzzles head for the bookshelf, if you like bonkers stories that meander everywhere, then this is the book for you. It is an unsettling read that includes a real life love story with Sam Mills, auto-fiction as well as the boyish ridiculous list: “No (a Yes cover band), Les Nombrilistes, The Nonplussed, The Nooks, No Shit Sherlock, The Noumena.”

Like the critical work Unwords, Loren Ipsum is a book you can dip into again and again. Read it once, then return in an endless loop that might feel part of a Tom McCarthy fiction.

Any Cop?: For Andrew Gallix this is his first foray into longer fiction. If this is his juvenilia I look forward to his middle years, and his late style. The exuberant critic has linked up with his double, the exuberant novelist.