The first thing you'll notice when you crack open Reader's Block is the curious appearance of its text. The book consists of 193 pages of concise declarative statements - apparently factual, and largely unrelated to one another - spaced apart in discrete paragraphs. These observations (often as short as a single sentence, or even just a single word) might be journal entries, notes from unsorted index cards, or the individual tiles of a cerebral mosaic - or they might be a cunningly cynical solution to the formal demands of novel-writing.

Readers familiar with L. M. Boyd's syndicated trivia column will find themselves right at home with this "Grab Bag" style of delivery; but unlike Boyd, who prefers the goofy world of weird science, novelist David Markson has culled his fact-snippets from the marble halls of Western Culture. Thinkers, writers, composers, artists - Markson has sampled the lives, works, eccentricities, and deaths of hundreds of creative types across the centuries, from Plato to James Joyce. The effect (presumably intended) is like climbing into the mind of an addled professor as he takes his last breath: Rather than a life flashing before your eyes, you get all the unwashed trivia of a lifelong liberal-arts education.

Reader's Block fails to make the leap from literary oddity to visionary landmark, however. Despite formal stretching, it remains simply a novel. Embedded in its blizzard of facts is a narrative: Once every five or ten paragraphs a fragment of fiction crops up, adding incrementally to the story of a narrator who refers to himself in the third person as "Reader."

The existence of Reader - a highly abstract entity, who may or may not be a lonely old man writing an experimental novel about his own mind - is obviously central to the book's meaning. Oddly, though, considering his role as title character, the narrator looks pale, almost translucent, beside the concrete wealth of data he can't stop remembering. Reader's tentative existence can't hope to compete with historical masonry like "T. S. Eliot's father manufactured bricks," or "Kipling was an anti-semite." Nor does his sense of loss - which seems to be the only emotion Reader has left - stand up against genuine descriptions of despair like "When Hemingway committed suicide, it was by leaning to press his forehead against the barrels of a shotgun braced at the floor."