By Harry Mathews
Introduction by Jonathan Lethem
ISBN: 9781628976090
Publication Date: June 17, 2025
A blend of postmodern metafiction and old-style bedroom farce, The Journalist explores the elusive, sometimes illusive, boundaries between facts and the fictions we weave around them.
The novel's protagonist, living at a time that might be the present in a city that might be anywhere, has decided for reasons of mental hygiene to keep a detailed record of his thoughts, words, and deeds. Very quickly, however, the project begins to absorb his entire life, as the increasingly meticulous recording of experience threatens to supplant experience itself. To make matters worse, what he records offers its own grist for worry: his devoted wife suddenly grows secretive, his equally devoted mistress turns evasive, his frustratingly independent son might or might not be visiting that same mistress behind his back, and his closest friend begins acting in mysterious ways (and is it just his imagination, or is this friend having clandestine meetings with his wife?). His ever more convoluted perceptions breed a dark muddle of suspicion, leading to a climax that is at once intensely funny and excruciatingly poignant.
Reviews
"The Journalist is both a slightly surreal comedy of manners and a frightening parable on the carnivorous nature of the written word. It's Mathews's most stunning and approachable fiction so far." —John Ashbery
"Harry Mathews's journal-writer is the perfect avatar of civilization and its discontents, a creation both comic and profound, and, perhaps, a new direction for Mathews: it combines his always brilliant social observation with a sustained psychological portrait of great depth and interest." —Diane Johnson
"A truly novel and seductive and funny book. Stories, dreams, loves, the elegantly shaped and the humbly unhinged—all we expect from Harry Mathews's fiction comes together as never before. This is his finest work." —Joseph McElroy
"The Journalist is an extraordinary feat, combining new extremes of conceptual torture with a credible and all-too-human emotional core—in addition to being quite entertaining and absorbing." —Lucy Sante
"The complications offered up by Mr. Mathews are both daunting and funny, in a kind of psychoslapstick way." —New York Times
"Harry Mathews invents ingenious formal patterns and combines them with unruly, even crazy, passion. Mad and rational, all head and too much heart, The Journalist explores the black, intricately organized interior of paranoia. Somehow the book also manages to portray a utopia of human goodness." —Edmund White
"Mathews is one of American literature's great idiosyncratic figures."—Susannah Hunnewell, The Paris Review
Biographical Information
Harry Mathews was born in New York City in 1930 and spent his adult life in the United States and in France, where he co-founded the influential journal Locus Solus with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler in 1961. He was the first American member of the literary consortium Oulipo, alongside Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec. His many writings, spanning novels, short fiction, poems, essays, and translations from the French, include The Conversions, Tlooth, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, Cigarettes, The Journalist, My Life in CIA, and The Solitary Twin. Mathews was honored by the French government as an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters and earned awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts. He died in Key West, Florida, in 2017.
Jonathan Lethem is the author of thirteen novels, including The Arrest and Chronic City, and his essays and stories have been collected in seven volumes. He’s received the Berlin Prize, The National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Macarthur Fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles and Maine.