out to work in a boutique in the Williamsburg section o Brooklyn that soldT-shirts with “Deend Brooklyn” and an AK-47 spraypainted on the ront(retail $85).These were what Prouveaux later called “the lean years.” “Oh, the strug-gle! I lived like a stray dog. No television, no Internet access, my subscriptionto
The Paris Review
had expired; I was orced to get by on a diet o vegetarianburritos and microwavable eggplant dishes that my parents mailed to meto make up or
le débâcle
Scrabble. But that struggle taught me so much. Ilearned how to simpliy, to cut back, to boil my lie down to the barest es-sences. All great art is made through sufering and so was I.”The writer delved into the work o Ellsworth Kelly and other abstract art-ists. She began to approach every aspect o her lie rom an abstract-centricpoint o view. During meals, Pawtuckett reused to eat all o the ood on herplate, leaving hints and suggestions o the ood that was once there so otherpeople’s minds could ll in the gaps. This oten angered the waiters at Ethio-pian and Indian restaurants, who also took great ofense when Pawtuckettailed to tip them. Around this time, she changed her name, eeling thatGladys Mae Pawtuckett was simply “too long and bourgeois.” Pawtuckett de-cided upon the much simpler and more proletarian Amélie Prouveaux.Then, in the spring o 2000, while attending an art installation in Chelseathat consisted o a boom box playing a CD o someone shouting “Cheetos!”repeatedly, Prouveaux devised an ingenious idea or a new novel. Slaving away, reusing to eat so she could sufer or her art, Prouveaux wrote what was to be considered by devoted ans and literary critics as her masterpiece.Simply titled
The
, this novel was a shot red across the bow o the literary establishment. Without any text whatsoever, this book with a single-wordmoniker would take the world by storm. “Dialogue, storytelling, plot, sym-bolism—the aesthetics o literature are as dead as the dinosaur. Literaturehas become a hostage to stories. These concepts have become as cheap asFreudianism.”
The
, with its unexplained title and lack o text, was written by Prouveaux to “allow the reader to ll in the gaps, to suggest their own mean-ing as opposed to being led around like sheep. The what? What does thereader think comes ater
the?
Let them derive the intrinsic nature o the text,rather than orcing them to ocus on its external appearance.” While it did not hit the
New York Times
bestseller list and ailed to receiveany positive reviews,
The
launched a revolution in literature. Bloggers andbookshop sales clerks championed
The
as i it were the second coming o TheBible. Publishers, sensing a trend, rushed to capitalize on Prouveaux’s inno- vation, releasing a slew o sub-par imitations such as Clinton Lowe’s
Poo
and
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