A Short Introduction to Annaliese by James Elkins

A Short Introduction to Anneliese

By James Elkins

Unnamed Press, 2025

Let’s say you think of yourself as a Marine of literature, one of the few and proud because you love the challenge of long and excessive and even maybe crazed contemporary novels.  You appreciated the bullshitting digressiveness and odd endnotes in Wallace’s Infinite Jest but not all that tennis.  You admired the multivolume connections and off-beat illustrations in Danielewski’s five-book Familiar series but not the fantasy elements.  I have a writer for you—James Elkins, who refers to both Wallace and Danielewski in a hundred-page chapter on long books in his A Short Introduction to Anneliese, which has all those features you enjoyed in Wallace and Danielewski.  Semper fi.

Every day for the past twenty years, Elkins has said, he worked on five interlocked books he calls a single novel entitled “Strange Languages.”  One of them, the 607-page Weak in Comparison to Dreams, was published in 2023.  Now comes the 569-page A Short Introduction to Anneliese, while I’ll shorten to Anneliese here.  That first to be released—and Elkins’ first published fiction after a career writing art and photography criticism—was about a sad-sack public health functionary, Samuel Emmer, whose daughter leaves for college, whose wife leaves for Bratislava, and whose supervisor makes him leave his undemanding job to investigate possible animal suffering in zoos world-wide—a triple whammy that causes Samuel’s psychic meltdown and strong, persistent dreams that Elkins illustrates with numerous photos of burning forests.  When questioned about his increasingly outrageous behavior with zoo directors, Samuel quits his job, moves to a small town, writes most of Dreams, puts the manuscript in his basement, runs across it forty years later, and adds more than a hundred pages of endnotes about the manuscript and his present life.  I hesitate to let you leave, but you can find more detail about Dreams in my review here: https://www.full-stop.net/2023/10/09/reviews/tomleclair/weak-in-comparison-to-dreams-james-elkins/

At the same time that Samuel is visiting those traumatizing zoos, his supervisor Catherine arranges contact with Anneliese Glur, a septuagenarian Swiss former professor with whom Catherine collaborated when both were graduate students in biology.  In an act of apparent revenge for Anneliese’s stealing a crucial formula from Catherine, she recommends the barely functioning Samuel as a reader of Anneliese’s life’s (unpublished) work, a whole roomful of large notebooks. Most of Elkins’ book is composed of Anneliese’s monologues explaining why she is hectoring Samuel to take on the task. Like Dreams, Anneliese purports to be a manuscript Samuel wrote long ago, rediscovered, and again appends notes to.

 Under the pressure of family and work events in Dreams, Samuel becomes floridly obsessive compulsive.  Anneliese has been so since she was a child.  Samuel has little emotional and intellectual life.  Anneliese has always been enraged by the stupidity of most people and the ignorance of scientists and famous writers.  She talks so much and at such volume that the elevator operator at her university asks her to stop, just stop.  That was before Anneliese was fired for breaking into a colleague’s home to correct errors in her work and before Anneliese spent most of every day and evening writing her grand unified theory of biology in her notebooks.  Anneliese knows that she may be demented and therefore dementedly analyzes various forms of insanity that may plague her, but she still wants someone—actually anyone, even a weak slug like Samuel—to read the 20,000 or 30,000 pages of those notebooks and, perhaps, arrange their publication. 

With its pervasive and dominating voice, Anneliese less resembles the work of Wallace and Danielewski than the angry, unfiltered, run-on first-person narrator of Lucy Ellmann’s thousand-page Ducks, Newburyport (to which Elkins refers) and, more familiarly and briefly, professor Kinbote/Botkin of Nabokov’s Pale Fire in which the visiting Russian professor imagines himself the escaped King of Zembla, believes he has found an ideal interlocutor in the American poet John Shade, and writes a long wacky commentary (with index) on Shade’s 999-line poem. 

I mention these similar works with obsessive narrators to suggest there’s considerable comedy in Anneliese—satire of academic discourse, doctors and hospitals, Wikipedia, movie credits, popular culture, and writerly ambition along with burlesque of the elitist know-it-all who does everything to excess: over-sharing details about her body scabs, over-ordering in a diner, over-engaged with worms and ticks, over-reacting to real and imagined slights.  Overweening Anneliese puts a new spin on Nietzsche’s “ubermensch”—over-doing even the most trivial activities.

For Elkins, employing such an overbearing protagonist and narrator is about as risky as walking a tightrope stretched between Manhattan and New Jersey.  Every long novel has longueurs.  Because of Anneliese’s repetition compulsions, Elkins’ daredevil book often lurches toward the Hudson but is repeatedly saved by his mimicry, beady wit, unparagraphed riffs, quite amazing anthropological learning (if authentic), and equally amazing inventions, which may seem like learning.  Anneliese has fewer visual materials than Dreams, but some important ones emerge near the end and in Samuel’s notes.  Anneliese also has less contact with the naked-eye world than Dreams, but Anneliese has much to say about the world seen through a microscope.

Elkins arranges his own possible pitfalls.  Unlike realistic novels, Anneliese sacrifices character conflict because Samuel is barely present and Anneliese is not so much a character with an explanatory backstory as she is an overflowing font.  Traditional fictional setting is reduced to various sites of hours-long conversations.  For so long a book, the plot is simple: will Samuel read the notebooks and, if he does, what will he find?  Some overwhelming philosophical/biological synthesis, some evidence of recovery from the author’s madness, or maybe materials that will influence his frightening dreams of burning forests? 

What replaces these novelistic conventions is language. “Strange Languages,” as Elkins’ overarching title says: foreign sentences and made-up words, specialized discourses from the sciences and humanities, fulsome meta analyses of disparate styles, a wonderful parody of epic poetry, voluble takedowns of that great philosopher of language, Wittgenstein, and that great massager of language Proust.  Eventually we find that Anneliese’s whole project of understanding the origins of life begins with language, the words ancient cultures had for the phenomenon.  Like dormant bacteria, dead languages come back to life in Anneliese’s notebooks and connect them with all humans, living and dead.

Given Anneliese’s fascination with, suspicion of, and dependence on language, it’s odd that she calls William Gass’s The Tunnel, a lengthy novel about a self-absorbed and unstable professor, “bats,” odd because her “book” (her collected notebooks) resembles Gass’s high-wire linguistic performances in that novel.  Furthermore, Anneliese thinks of herself as occupying a well that she, like Gass’s narrator in his basement, hopes to escape.  “It seems a country-headed thing to say,” Gass wrote in a 1979 essay, “that literature is language, that stories and the people and the places in them are merely made of words.” 

Given Elkins’ metalinguistic passions, metafiction can’t be far behind.  At the physical and conceptual center of Anneliese is that hundred-page chapter on long books—scientific, historical, medical, philosophical, religious, and fictional—that Anneliese reads and criticizes.  She comes to believe in “Long Novel Insanity.”  Her chief examples are Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and exceedingly long works by Arno Schmidt and Marianne Fritz.  Perhaps projecting her own vexed relation to her notebooks on these and other authors, Anneliese concludes that writers of such works disappear into them, become inhuman, insane.

Here is a short introduction to Anneliese’s conclusion in her inimitable, extravagant, hyperbolic style:

Long complex books are slow-acting poisons, everything in them is coated with a thin lacquer of poison, every stone in those opalescent worlds has been licked by the author’s poisoned tongue.  The writers of long books do not stand outside their books like carnival barkers, striding confidently on stage, basking in applause…because they are sunken into their books, they can no longer step back, they can’t climb out.

In Anneliese’s statement, one can hear Elkins’ anxiety about his own decades-long and five-volume long experimental project (that was completed before one of the books was published).  Anneliese claims to have discovered “uncultivable organisms,” “completely new forms of life that had never been cultured.”  She wanted her notebooks to create something similar, a new understanding of life, an intellectual wonder.  On the strength of these two published novels, Elkins seems on the way to creating a new version of or, at least, a radical bricolage of the long novel, an aesthetic wonder.  His chapter on long books both explores some possible influences and distinguishes his differences from them.  In a way, A Short Introduction to Anneliese would seem to be a long introduction to “Strange Languages,” but Elkins was probably wise to publish the more conventional and solicitous Dreams before the “uncultivable” Anneliese.

At what cost the cultivation of wonder?  The many pages of “Notes” that end both Dreams and Anneliese imply that Elkins survived or maybe will survive “Long Novel Insanity.”  Samuel returns to the two manuscripts but cares little about them or the past they contain.  Now in his nineties, Samuel occupies himself, in Dreams, playing dissonant notes and scores on his piano.  In Anneliese, he plays and comments on demanding, almost impossible pieces by Stockhausen, whose difficulties sometimes remind him of Anneliese and her notebooks.  Samuel believes he wrote the manuscripts so he would remember life back then, but now he seems to agree with Anneliese (when she discusses Proust) that such recordings of memories are inauthentic, made-up, fabricated—no matter how maniacally a writer such as Anneliese tries to capture experience.  So Dreams and Anneliese are Samuel’s fictions within Elkins’ fictions as the frames within frames within frames on both covers imply.  Live long enough, Samuel—and perhaps Elkins—imply and the largest and longest memories, even “systems of outlandish intricacy” will seem insignificant.  The music stops, only the notes remain.

Anneliese says she did not read long novels by Gaddis and Pynchon, writers to whom I compared Elkins in my review of Dreams.  Elkins’ novels won’t attract the kind of youthful cult following that formed around novels by Wallace and Danielewski, but if the remaining three works in “Strange Languages” are equal in complexity and profundity and pleasure to Dreams and Anneliese, I predict Elkins’ work will receive—like the novels of Gaddis and Pynchon—intense and continual study by academic critics.  Disappointed academic Anneliese hoped for something much more, but Elkins, a long-time professor, may be happy with attention in universities where, somewhat counterintuitively, literary Marines are often found.  “Oorah,” as the leathernecks shout.

Tom LeClair is the author of the five-volume, 1001-page “Passing” novel as well as a critical book called The Art of Excess and hundreds of essays and reviews in American periodicals.