The Loser

The novel  is an obsessive (I think), or at least an autistic droning of repetitions and paranoid preoccupations with a tight set of recurring themes, most of them apparently autobiographical. The central tenet is an acknowledgement from the narrator that he would never be as ‘good’ a pianist as Gould, and subsequent renouncement of the piano, and, subsequent inability to crystallise anything productive in his life as a result of ‘analysis paralyses’. The narrator, a nameless character, devotes the span of fifty odd years of his life, consumed, governed, informed by this one meme. He never publishes any of the work he keeps writing about Glenn Gould. The alternative would be a controlled descent into madness, which is exactly what happens to the narrator, arrested in a 2D plane of existence which never changes.