Going Down: A Novel

Going Down: A Novel

<DIV>Unlike David Markson’s most recent works, including <I>Vanishing Point</I> and <I>Wittgenstein’s Mistress,</I> which David Foster Wallace described as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country," his early novel, <I>Going Down,</I> is a more traditional effort, a masterfully plotted narrative set in Mexico in the 1960s. Three Americans, a man and two women, are living together in obvious intimacy. Their habits, strange to the Mexicans, are strangest of all to themselves.<BR><BR>When Fern Winters’ attention is caught by movement behind a window in a run-down Greenwich Village apartment building, she can’t suspect that her encounter with the apartment’s occupant will eventually lead her to be come upon in an abandoned chapel, in a tiny mountain village—clutching the bloody machete with which one of the three has been murdered.<BR><BR><I>Going Down</I> is a rarity among novels—brilliantly and poetically written, faultlessly constructed, centered on fully realized people, and yet completely uninhibited in its depiction of startling eroticism.<BR></div>