The Modern Reader

Pointlessness

I was innocently scrolling through my Reels when, once again, Jason Pargin grabbed me by the eyeballs with some minutia that I knew was going to waste my time, but I can’t help it. Pargin, the author of the darkly amusing novel, John Dies at the End, is actually quite interesting with his fascinating facts I didn’t know I didn’t know about The Mandalorian or Mountain Climbing or Multiverse Theories. I know he was the editor of Cracked.com but is there anything this guy is not curious about and does he always have to make me feel so anxious that I don’t know what he knows?

This time, though, he was strongly recommending the novel Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, the 2026 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. It is a brilliant book, not for the squeamish, that depicts a horrific, supernatural incident during World War I when a soldier accidentally shoots an angel. But what’s even more unusual about it, and undeniably cool, is that the entire 300-page novel is one sentence.

Now, as a fan of Jose Saramago, I’m used to punctuation iterations, and I wasn’t fazed at all by William Faulkner’s 1200-word plus sentence in Absalom, Absalom! Periods? Who needs stinking periods? Full stop.

But I got to thinking about this interesting sub-genre of pointlessness. It turns out another one of my favorite writers, Bohumil Hrabal (Too Loud a Solitude, Closely Watched Trains) wrote Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age in 1964, which is a funny, short and pointless novel about love, sex and other delightful ways to waste time. There’s a more serious and longer, Polish novel, The Gates of Paradise by Jerzy Andrzejewski about the ill-fated Children’s Crusade of 1212. Here the lack of punctuation perfectly follows the confusion and misdirection of this obsessive folly.

There are a few more interesting entries in this category, including two by László Krasznahorkai, the winner of the Noble Prize in 2025. Herscht 07769 is about a piano tuner channeling the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach and The Last Wolf is about a scholar who has a story to tell about a wolf but no one to listen to it. Solar Bones by Mike McCormack has a Joycean quality with its intriguing depiction of the day in the death of a ghost. Zone by Mathias Énard is a melancholy political thriller from the pointless point of view of an assassin coming to terms with his sins. (Enough pointless puns—hey, I could have written this without periods and given all of us a headache.)

The most breathless one

-sentence-novel is probably Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann. In 1,000-pages, this Booker-listed tour-de-force deconstructs suburban life and the American dream and bakes a lot of pies.

What I like most about these admittedly experimental or at least offbeat works is that they show that good story-telling doesn’t necessarily have to be a slave to good grammar and punctuation. I guess—one more—that’s my point.

—Stuart Matranga