Then, by complete coincidence, a couple of books which both play around with the conventions of the modern novel, layering storytelling upon storytelling in a dizzying exercise for the mind. I didn't plan to contrast them in this way, but a happy chance encounter anyway. Breakfast Of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut and If On A Winter's Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino.
Vonnegut's book is a hugely entertaining read as well as an incredibly ascerbic smart broadside at early-70s US culture. Chock full of barbed wit and the author's delightful little doodles, the essential conceit of reducing all comment and insight to the same level, as if observing the human race through the same even-handed prism, is a brilliant conceit for highlighting the absurdities and cruelities of, well, us.
"This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales. And so on. Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead."
In typing that passage out, I find myself thinking that from the "every person would be exactly as important..." line onwards, it's not a million miles away from a description of the Net. An impossible stretch, sure, but ... Also inadvertent echoes of Gray's book in the closing sentiments.
Calvino's is essentially quite different, but shares the desire to tweak the nose of the modern novel. Am only a third through, but it's written with such startling poetry and playful invention that I'm already quite affected by the whole thing.
