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
Biographical Information
Born in New York, Harry Mathews (1930-2017) settled in Europe in 1952 where he lived in Spain, Germany, Italy, and (chiefly) France. When Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the so-called New York School of poets, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972.