B.S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry

A metafictional novel about being driven to violence through tedium, BSJ's blisteringly pissed masterwork might be more timely than ever.

This article was originally written in 2016 for my column at Vice, but it was killed for not being timely enough after they switched directions to focus on clicks. - bb

I’m not sure you could come up with a better name for an experimental writer than B.S. Johnson: it sounds like someone both regal and a joke, which for the English writer of this name, who walked a strange line between outsider artist and one at the cusp of avant-garde, it could hardly be more fitting. B.S. Johnson was decades ahead of his own time, both in the fuck-all way he approached the act of narrative, and the very outline of his life. His was a career, like Stein’s or Beckett’s, that would not begin to find its traction until long after his death, and for my money, still not to the level he deserves.

From the beginning, it was clear that Johnson wanted little to do with the bullshit tropes of how a book is known to work. Raised by a working class family and spending his early years working as a bank clerk, he eventually taught himself Latin and left the workforce for college, then began writing as an assault on what he critically referred to as the “neo-Dickensian” output of those who would become his literary peers.