To After That (TOAF)

Having published a number of Gladman’s slippery and strange experimental fiction works (Event Factory, The Ravickians, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, Houses of Ravicka, and the upcoming My Lesbian Novel), the Dorothy Project revives this 2008 account of her failed attempts to write After That, which would have been her first novel. Poet Paul Valéry famously wrote that “a poem is never finished, only abandoned,” a point that Gladman bolsters as she circles and recircles her work’s uncertain course of creation, from the rapturous early throes of furious napkin jotting, through years of fresh drafts and abandonments, culminating in “a flat, unalterable end.” Amid a searching metanarrative absorbed with linguistic and epistemological quandaries, Gladman provides just enough hints about the plot of her “ghost book” to suggest that it may have been a more inherently interesting failure than this “writing about the writing about the writing of that long ago book” proves to be—which may or may not be the point of the whole exercise.