Half of Harry Mathews’ novel The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium was written in unintelligible pidgin English, which may explain why 25 publishers rejected it.
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His novel The Conversions, otherwise in English, concluded with nine pages in German.
For readers groping to unravel the convoluted structure of his satire Cigarettes, he cautioned, "There’s no point in looking for it now because no one will ever figure it out, including me."
"I’ve always said that my ideal reader would be someone who, after finishing one of my novels, would throw it out the window, presumably from an upper floor of an apartment building in New York," he told Susannah Hunnewell of the Paris Review in 2007, "and by the time it had landed would be taking the elevator down to retrieve it."
Mr. Mathews, an idiosyncratic novelist, poet, essayist, translator and self-described refugee from an upper floor of an apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, died on Jan. 25 in Key West after decades of confounding critics and captivating readers. He was 86.
His wife, the French novelist Marie Chaix, said Mr. Mathews had died of an intracerebral hemorrhage.
Since his first book was published, in 1962, when he was 32 and living in Paris, he had become a cult figure, more so to non-English-speaking fans abroad than in his native United States. In its interview with him, the Paris Review said Mr. Mathews "rightfully belongs to the experimentalist tradition of Kafka, Beckett and Joyce."
Mr. Matthews said he was originally inspired to write to fulfill Henry James’ dictum "lust to know." But he left some baffled readers who had persevered through his unconventional prose still lusting to know what, if any, deeper meaning he had hoped to convey.
"In The Conversions, Tlooth and The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium," he once said, "the narrators are all trying to solve some riddle or mystery and are overcome by an obsessive conviction that they will be able to find a definitive answer, but it all falls apart."
For decades, Mr. Mathews was the sole American member of Oulipo, the quirky French literary salon where authors and mathematicians practice what they call constrained writing: forcing themselves to follow contrived formulas — for example, using specific words or leaving out certain letters. (Oulipo is short for ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or "workshop of potential literature.")
He qualified for the group unwittingly, he recalled, after engaging in a particularly challenging word game: He rewrote Keats’ poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci by using the vocabulary from a Julia Child recipe for a cauliflower dish, and vice versa.
What some might see as completely pointless, he found intellectually liberating.
"I gave myself the task of writing a story using the 185 words that were found in 46 proverbs," he told the Paris Review. "This is a forbiddingly small vocabulary. It was hard to know what to do with them. Then I started putting words together, and a few words would lead to a sentence, and then eventually it became this sweet love story. It was as though you were wandering through a jungle and suddenly you came into a clearing that is a beautifully composed garden. It’s extraordinary, the feeling it gives you."
In a pot versus kettle competition, another Oulipian, Georges Perec, who wrote a novel, appropriately called A Void, without ever using the letter "e," suggested that Mr. Mathews abided by rules of writing "from another planet."
Harry Burchell Mathews was born in New York on Feb. 14, 1930. His father, Edward J. Mathews, was an architect who contributed to the design of Rockefeller Center and helped establish the New York City Planning Commission. His mother, the former Mary Burchell, was an arts patron who had inherited a real estate fortune.
He was raised on Beekman Place and attended the private St. Bernard’s School, where, he said, he wrote his first serious work, a poem, when he was 11:
It was a sad autumnal morn
The earth was but a mass of clay
Of foliage the trees were shorn
Leaving their branches dull and gray.
He graduated from the Groton School in Massachusetts, dropped out of Princeton in his sophomore year to join the Navy and graduated from Harvard in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in music and musicology.
He said he learned a lot about narrative writing from comic books ("lots of invention and no pretense of realism") but deliberately avoided college courses in literature.
"Literature was my great love," he told the Paris Review, "and I was determined to keep it unsullied by academia."
After Harvard, he moved to Paris with his wife at the time, the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. There he planned to study conducting but he changed course when the poet John Ashbery introduced him to the works of Raymond Roussel, the French proto-surrealist.
With Ashbery and another poet, Kenneth Koch, Mr. Mathews founded a literary magazine called Locus Solus, named for one of Roussel’s books. It lasted only four issues but published work by leading writers and poets, including James Schuyler as well as Ashbery and Koch.
Mr. Mathews’ marriage to de Saint Phalle ended in divorce. He is survived by two children from that marriage, Laura Mathews Condominas and Philip Mathews; his wife, Chaix; two stepdaughters, Emilie Chaix and Leonore Chaix; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Mathews had divided his time between France and the United States, where he taught and had homes in New York and Key West.
His first book, The Conversions, published in 1962, is about a wealthy New Yorker who dies and stipulates that the protagonist will inherit his fortune if he can decode the mysterious symbols engraved on the blade of a ritual ax.
Terry Southern praised it in the Nation as a "startling piece of work," though Time magazine complained that Mr. Mathews’ bounteous symbolism "spreads through the novel like crab grass."
In 1975, Edmund White, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called Mr. Mathews’ The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium — structured around an exchange of letters between a husband and wife searching for a lost medieval treasure — a "comic masterpiece."
Among his other novels were The Journalist (1994), Cigarettes (1987), My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 (2005) and the forthcoming The Solitary Twin.
He also wrote Singular Pleasures, a 1988 book made up of 61 vignettes about masturbation. He chose that topic, he said, "because it’s the universal form of sexual activity, and it’s hardly been written about."
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