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Blank. Davis Schneiderman. Jaded Ibis Press. http://jadedibisproductions.com. 200 pages; paper, $14.99.

This is one review whose word count will be greater than the novel it's about. Yes, "novel" is the term on the front cover, under the title, Blank. The author is also credited there: Davis Schneiderman. Those familiar with Schneiderman's previous publications will know that writer's block can't be the cause of his radical brevity this time around. Indeed, it's safe to say that his sixty word (200 page) novel would mean a lot less (have less meaning) if the same author had not filled hundreds of previous pages with dense thickets of particularly unrelenting prose. Blank, then, might best be understood as a companion piece to Drain (2010) and Abecedarium (2007). It's almost an expression of burnout, of the creative mind as spent husk after so much manic verbal and narrative energy: like the author confessing his intellectual exhaustion with a shrug and a sigh, bearing the frustrated implication that the reader should write his own damn novel for a change.

But the intended point is more likely that the reader always does just this, so, in the case of Blank, the pretense of the author's filling in of the details (names of characters, specific actions, etc.) is dispensed with. The book has chapter titles, previewed in a table of contents, and each chapter is exactly ten pages long. (A practical critic might suggest that the chapter lengths could vary a bit more, in the interest of novelistic verisimilitude.) The pages are "blank" (hence the title), except for periodically appearing images of holes, with burnt edges, revealing sky and clouds, as if seen from the window of an airplane (in black and white photography). The appearance of the holes, or windows, is less predictable than the chapter titles, being spaced five, ten, eleven, or twelve pages apart. Generally ragged ovals in shape, they vary in size and in placement on the page.

The plot suggested by the chapter headings is generic, with a couple of twists. Character one and character two are introduced in their respective chapters, they meet, encounter obstacles, and fall in love; more obstacles come and they eventually split up, and one "turns...to the mind," the other "to the body." Then, in the most interesting twist, "They encounter an animal" (chapter 13 out of 20). They end up getting back together, but then one of them gets sick, the other worries, one of them dies (sounds like Erich Segal's Love Story [1970] so far), but then "You die" (the reader, in chapter 18), and, finally, the author dies ("I die"—chapter 19).

A lot of fun can be had with such a concept, to be sure. People could fill in their own chapters, hundreds of people could write their own Blank novels, in a careful, small scribble, and remaining wary to stay within the strictly isometric chapter lengths.

Or the table of contents, taken on its own, could be read as a poem.

In either case, however, an unusually high burden for making meaning would be placed on the recipient of the message, the reader. In this regard, Schneiderman makes his point well, because whatever the reader comes up with will, in a sense, belong to Blank. My Madame Bovary looks, speaks, moves, etc. in ways that I have invented without direct instructions from Gustave Flaubert. My Huck Finn, and, without a doubt, my son's Spider-man, have actually engaged in acts that Mark Twain or Stan Lee never depicted them doing, yet Twain and Lee remain the "authors" of these characters. What makes Blank different than examples like these is that the template of character, plot, etc., remains so "blank" that readers are left with not enough to latch onto to actually create an actual living text out of the author's materials. What the reader does instead as a response to Blank is wonder about the term under the title on the front cover: "novel." That would make more a work of criticism than a novel (though every novel is on one level...

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