Markson dedicates this novel, about a Bohemian gringo throuple unhinging in darkest Mexico, to Malcolm Lowry — but it reads like Lowry lobotomized, or maybe Lowry lampooned by someone overfamiliar with the baroque excesses of literary Modernism. I hated too many things to list, but I’ll try anyway:

• Spanish dialogue rendered in English, but marked as Spanish by leaving a random word (hombre, or borracho or just sí) untranslated. Or, even more infuriating, weird in-sentence self-translations like “perhaps nearby in the night came the xopilotes, the vultures” (this is supposed to be a Mexican person speaking). For most of the book the Mexican characters — either unknowable Indians or shady mestizos — are cardboard cutouts, but when we do get a glimpse of their inner lives they turn out, amazingly, to be even more clichéd within than without.

• Masses of tenuous literary-artistic allusions that are oh-so-unoriginal. Joyce, Eliot, Shakespeare, Van Gogh, Goya, give it a goddamn rest. Nobody in real life thinks or talks this way.

• Dialogue that reads like interior monologue — every utterance ending in an inconclusive em dash — and interior monologue distinguishable only because it’s in italics.

• Flashbacks that are only there so Markson can tick the “non-linear narrative” box on his highbrow novel bingo card, and a burglary scene that’s somehow both excruciating and superfluous.

• A handful of three-way sex scenes that, despite getting Kurt Vonnegut hot under the collar (based on his thigh-rubbing blurb), made me fairly certain that Markson wrote them with a dog-eared copy of “The Joy of Sex” at his elbow.

• A main character whose name is Steve Chance. Another character whose name is Talltrees.

• Dictionary-bothering vocab deployed more clunkily than a copy of the OED falling down the stairs: “The doctor’s voice fell, enclitic. For the moment, staring at him, Talltrees felt a curious sense of displacement himself, as if time were someway abeyant.”

I guess the redeeming features of this book were someway abeyant from me. I just found it, to use another of Markson’s pet adjectives, stercoraceous. Wittgenstein’s Mistress is great though.