More than ever, the concept of ‘realism’ is ambiguous and conflicted. In a contemporary culture where not only our lives and experiences are diffuse and various, but the very world around us creaks under a weight of information, the idea of a neat continuum bookended by poles of pure realism and experimental fiction has become obsolete. How does one hold a mirror to the world when the glass is not big enough for the reflection?
theMystery.doc, the second novel from Matthew McIntosh, attempts to confront this problem in the simplest way possible. By making the mirror bigger. Clocking in at over 1,600 pages, the book is back-breakingly large, though the process of reading it is less strenuous. Filled with photographs and film stills and poetic structural play, this is as much an art piece as a novel. There are first-person narratives and chat-room transcripts and audio recordings of conversations, as well as flip-book sequences of pictures, from billowing stars and stripes to the fall of the towers on 9/11. There are illustrated pages, blank pages, pages filled with cryptic symbols. Pages on which the words NOW HOW DO YOU FEEL are repeated over and over.
However, far from being disorientating, each of these breaks in the text acts as a brief timeout that allows the reader to process what has been and prepare for what is next. Indeed, even at it’s most experimental, a sense of curation remains. This does not mean that the entire process is controlled, because it seems pretty clear that McIntosh doesn’t know what will come of his experiments, but rather that it is operating according to some sense of logic or intuition. In this way, the prologue of the novel soon becomes clear. A passage from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, it asks if there is anything more beautiful than seeing a “great lake of pitch, boiling hot” inhabited by a “swirling mass of serpents, snakes, lizards, and many other grisly and savage creatures” and being told that a prize is hidden beneath the dark surface. The test, then, is whether or not the dread of the lake can be overcome so that the redemption below can be reached. In several ways, not least its daunting size, theMystery.doc represents the boiling pitch, challenging the reader to wade into its mire. Those brave enough to take that leap of faith, to trust McIntosh and dive into his own lake, might find different visions on the other side. But rest assured another side they will find.
The basic narrative involves a character named Matthew McIntosh, who is attempting to write a novel, and has been for years and years (presumably what we are reading). Around this centre rotates a collection of other characters and story lines—A father, a pastor, is dying (or has died) of cancer, a couple lose a baby girl, Margaret—and it seems to be happening to McIntosh, though there is no obvious linear development. The characters appear and disappear at will, and perhaps even merge. Another character, or another McIntosh, is working on a different novel, The Pollutionist, as though a parallel version on a different track. That said, tracing the exact relationship of every part is perhaps beside the point. The links are more thematic than narrative, and as such the characters seem less like a web of disparate people than various versions of the same figures, meaning each variation of McIntosh seems to hold some degree of truth and value.
The upshot is that the idea of the book being a huge mirror trying to reflect our endless world is not true in a fundamental sense. For all of it’s tangents and rabbit holes, the novel is not an encyclopedia aiming to represent an entire society. Rather, it is a multi-faceted view as seen on a personal level, one steeped in intimacy and introspection no matter how removed the narrator from the plot. The temptation is to compare it to other Big Books that stitch disparate elements, perhaps Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook or something by William Gaddis, but those novels feel centred on capturing a society in itself. theMystery.doc is just as ambitious, but uses it’s scope in a different way. Where Dara’s protagonist-free novel brings to life a community through a multitude of voices, McIntosh brings to life a person through variations of the same voice. Indeed, if he is holding up a mirror, it seems to be to his own eye, with the hope of solving the mystery inside his head. The question of what it means to be human.
theMystery.doc is out now via Grove Press.