A Kind of Novel

I experienced it almost exactly as I might a novel, and it sounded today as if at least part of you agreed. I'm not sure whether receiving it as emails would have made much difference. I'm willing to entertain the idea that it might have, but I'm suspicious.

It seems novelistic in several ways:

• Clear unilinear sequence
• Advancing plot that builds to crisis
• Defined sense of where one is in the story (just scroll down)
• Ease in rereading or flipping ahead

I'm not convinced that it engages readers differently than do novels. After all, novels have purported to be lost diaries or manuscripts, sets of letters, all sorts of things, really. One holds the book and knows that it is a book. One views Kind of Blue online and knows it's not an inbox.

I don't mean all this to minimize what the author's done here, however. Quite the opposite. This is an online text that does (as successfully as it does it) what a novel does. There may be some limits to the epistolary form -- it might be hard to do some of what stream of consciousness novels do -- but it's a set of limits quite consonant with the activity of most novels.

Those interested in the dialogic aspects of this work might check out Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo; Faulkner, of course; La hojarasca or Leaf Storm, by Marquez; or Two Fields that Face and Mirror Each Other, by Martin Nakell. Or the theoretical works of Mikhail Bakhtin