Suicide by Language, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s new novel, is fragmentary, aphoristic, fractured, but above all provocative.  St. Thomasino eschews plot-and-character development for the blank space of the page, for the shimmering emptiness of screen.  The result is a sort of performance of erasure implicating less the death of the author/narrator than of the poem/novel narrated by itself.  The reader is told that Suicide by Language was inspired by the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Robbe-Grillet—and indeed, with these auteurs, St. Thomasino shares an anti-narrative impulse, but he takes it a step further.  This is a conceptual work, in the sense that this breakdown, this blankness, could be asserted as “hero” to its anti-text.  No matter your expectations, this work will surely confound them.  

 

—Mark DuCharme

 

Coming. . . .