Tripticks
Ann Quin
And Other Stories, 2022
Review by Thea McLachlan
With life being as loud, hyper saturated, and cloying as it is, there isn’t much space to marshall desperately the bits of body, bile, memory, and spirit, the cute things about you—to tie them together and call them the self. Even when you have found the quote-unquote peace and quiet to reflect on who you are and what you want, life, being ordained (spiritually, cosmically, psychologically, algorithmically, whatever) can make this work feel futile. These anxieties claw at the heart of the newly republished Tripticks (first published in 1972), the fourth and final novel by British sixties experimentalist Ann Quin: in a world that seems overwhelming and overdetermined, how do you get closer to yourself?
Tripticks is about a curmudgeonly man pursuing his ex-wife across America. Quin likes stories which begin as quests for one thing and end up being a search for something else (the self). In Berg, her first novel, a son travels to the sea to kill his father. In Passages, a sister looks for her lost brother. Quin is concerned, too, in both of these novels, with life’s predictability. Berg in Berg is nauseous at the “futility of everything,” bored watching someone react “exactly as expected.” The sister’s boyfriend in Passages is annoyed at how he is perceived—at being reminded by his lover that things are following a pattern. “Something to be said for remaining in a place far off, without name, without identity,” he says.
Tripticks, then, follows well-clomped material for Quin. Yet this novel feels more panicked, more frenzied. The novel is set in an all-dressed consumerist hellscape version of America. There are TV bras, a President that recites “an ode to the hotdog,” and mail order meditation societies where disciples pray by letter for “noiseless vacuum cleaners” and “mock mental collapse.” Driving, the narrator sees a world full of the melodrama you would expect in an eighties/nineties novel on late capitalism. There are “sheer walls of symmetrical blue grey basaltic columns,” “a sea life housed in 13 large glass tanks with perforated seals and prostate mermaids,” and “an outdoor hippopotamus pool with a 24 hour room Food & Valet service with Guest controlled Built-in Vanity Comfort stations and mercury vapour lamps atop 27 towers overlooking an animated relief map pergolas and spring-fed lily pools.”
The main character dwells. He thinks about his relationships, settles into memories, shifting into dreams and returning, occasionally, to the present—where he is, for instance, “[a]fraid to get close to people especially women, he must treat them as objects of his imagination—a role that implies both control and distancing.” He wonders what his ex’s new lover will think of him and decides: “Possibly old and impotent, with a future as narrow as my shoulders, striding along like some sort of sage-brush propelled by winds of unknown origin.”
Tripticks is a book to get lost in, to turn back on, to flick the page backward and forward to remember what, exactly, is going on—an act that mirrors the protagonist’s own interiority and quest. It is written in a cut-up style of lists, notes, letters, dreams, and memories. These spheres—dreams, reality, memory—bleed together, lacking all of them the steadiness of verisimilitude. There is very little to remind you of what is what. The flimsiness of reality enhances the feeling that the protagonist lacks control; that he does not have the physical solidity in his life to define it for himself.
There are, throughout Tripticks, accompanying comic strip illustrations in black and white that seem not to match the text. In the introduction, Danielle Dutton suggests this may be because an earlier version of Tripticks was printed alongside an unrelated comic strip when it was published in the quarterly Ambit, as the 1968 prize winner for Best Writing While on Drugs (Quin’s story was written under the influence of the contraceptive pill). Hilary White, in an article on the cut up form in Quin’s work, describes the comic strip as “akin to a television set flickering in the background.” It adds to the cacophonous, sprawling entertainment of reading Tripticks.
During his quest, our protagonist loses focus. At some point he becomes the one being followed, as he watches his ex-wife and her new lover through the rearview mirror. “Who was chasing who I had forgotten,” he says. He thinks about leaving it all behind and going to the beach, but worries his ex will join a group called Women Against War Toys and build sandcastles of peace on the beach next to him. He considers giving up on the pursuit and returning to normal life, but: “That undersea realm I have visited is exacting its price of admission. Living in the depth. I have become in certain ways a creature of those depths, adapted to their pressures. Now the human environment is temporarily unavailable to me.” He needs more time.
The latter part of the novel shifts inwards; the predetermined America has left the narrator feeling empty. He observes with resignation: “But beyond all these gigantic dimensions lies an immeasurable mystery, perhaps for reasons beyond your control, you may find your identity is not building up as fast as you expect it to.” At the end, he feels a scream coming out of “[f]ear for safety and sanity, helplessness, frustration, and a desperate need to break out into a stream of verbal images.” Screaming, like sobbing, is private, personal, a communication of pain which is his alone to feel and understand. And yet, the world has choked even that out of him: “I opened my mouth, but no words. Only the words of others I saw, like ads, texts, psalms, from those who had attempted to persuade me into their systems.”
Tripticks is a fascinating novel—and while it lacks the lyrical interiority that I loved about Quin’s earlier work, it offers instead a bold vividness in world building that doesn’t shy away from describing the Big Gulp, Super Soaker pace of life. And in that world, what hope is there? Quin herself looked for refuge in the ocean; in an interview, she described wanting “a tower, facing the sea.” The sea’s space to breathe and enveloping constancy are not afforded to our narrator. For him and for us— still here, without an escape—the only way to turn is inwards. As the narrator says: “In here all you have are instincts.”
Thea McLachlan is a writer living in London. She can be contacted at thea.f.mclachlan@gmail.com. Find her on Instagram @theafraser__ or on substack at iloveemails.substack.com.