Mantissa

Awakening in a hospital without access to his identity, John Fowles's Mantissa places the novelist Miles Green under the care of a specialist who may also be his muse. The clinical scene quickly refuses stable reality: roles change, memory is negotiated, and the room becomes a stage on which writer and inspiration argue over who creates whom. Their exchanges move between seduction, resistance, literary theory, and comic hostility. Instead of building a conventional external plot, Fowles turns the act of composition into the book's contested event.

Miles wants authority over the story, but the woman opposite him repeatedly exposes the assumptions behind that claim. The novel treats gender, desire, and authorship as intertwined performances, using abrupt transformations to interrupt any secure division between creator and character. Its wit is deliberately abrasive, and the confined setting intensifies the sense that every gesture may be another draft rather than an independent fact. Mantissa therefore works as both a self-conscious fiction and a quarrel with the habits of self-conscious fiction. The form's recursive pressure leaves creation looking less like solitary command than an unstable negotiation between imagination, language, and the figure who refuses to remain material.