Tag Archives: richard clegg

The Exuberant Novelist

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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.

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

Gargantuan and Magisterial

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Clegg, Richard. “Stories That Will Last.” Review of Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C. D. Rose, Bookmunch, 24 February 2023:

… Another boost to the author’s reputation is his inclusion in the gargantuan and magisterial collection of articles by Andrew Gallix Unwords, a survey of modern European fiction, that has just been published by Dodo Ink. It is fitting that C. D. Rose is amongst good company there with the Robbe-Grillets, the Calvinos, and the lesser known North Western writer, H. P. Tinker.

This final quotation, from Andrew Gallix’s essay on Michel Butor, about the laboratory of narrative could stand for C. D. Rose as well:

“Whether he is analysing how a fictive locale may reconfigure the space in which a book is read or excavating old objects … his insights continue to feel new-minted and exhilarating.”