theMystery.doc
Matthew McIntosh
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
theMystery.doc
Matthew McIntosh
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Perhaps the most useful way to think about theMystery.doc is as an experiential novel, one we live with (or through), rather than read. A pastiche, a collection of moments that both connect and don’t, it blurs the line between text and image, fact and fiction; it is not postmodern but post-postmodern, or maybe none of the above. At the same time, it is surprisingly accessible for such a long book: not a critique of meaning so much as an evocation of meaning’s aftermath—an expression, in other words, of the chaotic culture in which we live.
After publishing the widely praised novel Well in 2003, Matthew McIntosh began this mammoth project. It’s a supersize version of Well: same desolate setting and downbeat prose style, same puzzling digressions, same unusual form and expressive typography. But everything here is blown up to Imax proportions.
An uncharitable reader could easily fill up all the black and blank space in this book with dismissals. But the author’s formal trickery can’t be written off as merely evasive, pretentious, or coy. Setting aside the reader’s perfectly valid expectations of entertainment and pleasure, theMystery.doc is some sort of masterpiece—obscure or vulnerable by jagged turns, but in every moment energized by a self-assured sense of purpose: the novel knows, even if you are, for a long time, completely in the dark.
It doesn't read anything like a traditional novel — not as quickly, not as smoothly, not as satisfyingly, none of it. McIntosh's second book reads shattered. It reads fragmentary. It reads like trying to unwind Christmas lights from a thorn bush — pinpricks of brilliance hung up in confusion and pain. It reads like a symphony written by a speed freak and performed by industrial robots. All crashing symbols, and between, only silence.
What kind of experimental novel is theMystery.doc? From the early going it’s plain that the goal of this book is not to entertain but to sow discomfort. The passages are short, splintered and disconnected, sprays of 'random buckshot,' in Mr. McIntosh’s words...The writing throughout is numbed and uninflected, perceiving the world in the unfocused way of someone groggy from too much cold medicine. The mood ranges from puzzlement to muted horror.
...an audacious, sprawling, messy, and aptly titled antinovel that rarely subscribes to a conventional narrative format.
It also features reams of pages made up mostly of asterisks. These may be a wink to Edith Wharton’s story ‘The Muse’s Tragedy’. They occasionally represent snowfall, but they are also the snow or static on a television, it seems; appropriately for a book much concerned with technology and its discontents … Even the extent of the book is a kind of awful realism: as if McIntosh is saying ‘too much, too much, too much’ again and again and again. He himself appears as a character, and that makes it even more problematic that the book tries to diagnose itself … theMystery.doc is like a giant scrapbook of ideas for books. Many are clever, many are moving, many are sincere, many are intriguing: but not all of them should be between two covers..
A vast, beguiling, but mixed-bag postmodern novel of ideas, misread intentions, and robots, told in words, pictures, symbols, and even blank pages.