“No so-called furniture”

David Markson, from This Is Not a Novel (2001).

Markson was almost certainly thinking of Willa Cather’s 1922 essay “The Novel Démeublé”:

The novel, for a long while, has been over-furnished. The property-man has been so busy on its pages, the importance of material objects and their vivid presentation have been so stressed, that we take it for granted whoever can observe, and can write the English language, can write a novel. Often the latter qualification is considered unnecessary.

This post is the first of many with excerpts from this novel.

Related reading
All OCA David Markson posts : Willa Cather posts (Pinboard)

[Démeublé: unfurnished.]