Lionel Shriver.

Harper, $26.99.

Lionel Shriver wrote her latest novel, The New Republic, before the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and, according to the book’s foreword, held it back until both her sales record and the public appetite for a terrorism-themed satire increased. Her first stroke of good fortune came swiftly when her 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, a school-massacre thriller that arrived a tasteful distance after the 1999 killings at Columbine High School, became a mega-hit and, eventually, a film starring Tilda Swinton. As for a public willingness to chuckle at anything terrorism-related, a decade would seem to suffice for the old mantra about tragedy plus time yielding comedy. The problem for Ms. Shriver is that the first wave of terrorism black comedy must necessarily have a sharpness, and a sense of gravity and for the facts on the ground that The New Republic utterly lacks.

The novel takes its title both from the real-life magazine for which its bumping-up-on-middle-aged protagonist, Edgar Kellogg, has freelanced and from Barba, a fictional peninsula dangling off the bottom of the Iberian peninsula, seeking independence from the government in Lisbon. Kellogg has thrown aside his legal career to write professionally and, having been swiftly hired by a USA Today-ish daily, is yet more swiftly dispatched to the would-be independent nation of Barba, where a terroristic nationalist front is centered and where his predecessor has gone missing.

More so than We Need to Talk About Kevin, The New Republic deeply indulges Ms. Shriver’s worst quality as a prose stylist—a tendency toward didactic, inhuman dialogue. Her tin ear for the patterns of human speech borders on the Randian; her political philosophy is, simply, that life is nasty, brutish and far too long. “Saddler’s appetite for poontang was suspicious,” says one character. “The nightmares were fabulous, lush with fantastic fears, hilarious with misadventure,” says another. The nadir: “Nicola, you’re the only one in town who’s ever noticed that the emperor might not be dressed to the nines. Your journo friends here operate like Visa card outfits.”

The jags of dialogue in this novel are neither colloquial enough to be honest nor outlandishly posh enough to approach the best of Evelyn Waugh (though Scoop is a clear influence here)—they indicate an author seemingly unsure of just how grounded in reality she wants her novel to be. Ms. Shriver’s ineptitude with human speech served We Need to Talk About Kevin well; it was told in the first person, through letters written by a haughty woman brought low who clearly labored over each word. The tormented prose could be read as the product of a tormented mind. So Much for That, Ms. Shriver’s most recent novel, had a similar problem with its dialogue. A political tract centered upon in the American health-care debate, its characters (who, to be fair, felt far more real and recognizable emotions than the characters in The New Republic) recited hastily rewritten policy papers.

What does tend to save The New Republic’s dialogue from the worst kind of didacticism is how apolitical it is. The foreign correspondents with whom Kellogg works spout off constantly but rarely express coherent political philosophies. Instead, they end up repeating the same tautologies about getting the story and the same gripes about how hellish Barba is.

The book’s politics occur mainly in Kellogg’s mind and his relationship with his editor back in America. He discovers that his predecessor, a beloved foreign correspondent, had been fabricating stories and claiming that terrorist attacks by the Barban liberation front were the work of others. Satire is only effective when it’s believable, and The New Republic beggars belief when Kellogg begins calling American papers, impersonating a Barban terrorist and claiming that various terrorist attacks on European and American soil are the work of his comrades.

Ms. Shriver never bothers to show quite how this maneuver actually helps his journalistic career. He generally calls papers he isn’t working for; how this results in scoops for his own paper is never made clear. And a setting that features a steady stream of terrorist attacks for which no one claims responsibility is itself a stretch for anyone who even occasionally follows the news cycle.

Bret Easton Ellis set his 2005 novel, Lunar Park, in what was clearly an alternate reality, wherein terror was visited upon families by an unknown and unknowable entity. The only significant differences between the world Ms. Shriver has created and our own are wildly unrealistic dialogue and a picaresque focus on incident. The author legitimately seems to believe that a series of terrorist attacks could be claimed by some fellow using a kazoo to disguise his voice, because no one else would come forward.

Ultimately, The New Republic drips with condescension for its reader, nowhere more so than in its closing two pages, where it’s implied that Kellogg took credit for the events of Sept. 11, 2001, on behalf of the Barban terrorists for whose cause he cares little but whose existence nebulously boosts his writing career.

The concept of a writer conflating real events into ludicrous fantasies to boost his or her career cannot be a foreign one to Ms. Shriver. Indeed, The New Republic seems less ghoulish and more clever when it’s read as a comment on its own existence and Ms. Shriver’s career as a magpie of human misery. Despite or perhaps because of its flaws, The New Republic is compulsively readable—just like the news coverage of global tragedy that Ms. Shriver implies exists merely for the pleasure viewers find in catharsis.

In this novel, deaths that occur offstage are treated so lightly that the reader comes to care little for those that happen onstage—those of central characters. The theme here is charisma—why some men’s lies are easily swallowed and help bolster their myths, while others’ merely make them appear pathetic—and yet Ms. Shriver makes little effort to fully investigate this phenomenon. Things are interesting because Kellogg thinks they are, and he thinks they are simply because he is insecure about having been fat as a child.

This is programmatic writing that is as devoted to simple cause-and-effect as a briefing in a big USA Today-style paper. It bears no resemblance to the complexities of the truth—either about world events or, more pertinently, human nature—and in that it is similar to the prose of a harried writer on deadline, working toward the end-of-night pint. If Ms. Shriver, herself a journalist who has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, set out to summarize through her style the manner in which journalism fails its subjects, she has succeeded brilliantly.

The sad irony of The New Republic, ultimately, is that it violates the journalistic dictum an editor articulates in its first 20 pages: “The hack who fancies himself a mover-and-shaker gets slipshod—thinks he’s covering his own story.” Ms. Shriver strives to shake up her readers’ sensibilities regarding both terrorism and human nature by overstepping the bounds of what she is able to convey, and ends up covering a story that is irresistible only to her.

Paul La Farge. (Photo: Carol Shadford)

Later this month, Paul La Farge will publish his fourth book, Luminous Airplanes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $25.00), a novel of fewer than 250 pages of words on paper but quite a bit more than that on a website specially designed to extend the story, with new chapters continually added over the next year or so. By the time it’s done, the site will contain a work “about three times larger than the book,” according to Mr. La Farge, who discussed the project with The Observer over email.

Mr. La Farge has always been something of a trickster. His previous three books featured various intellectual and stylistic conceits, like narratives of dreams in both English and French, relief-block illustrations, and the earnestly presented (if transparently false) notion that Mr. La Farge had translated a text rather than written it himself. Luminous Airplanes, as you will find it in a three-dimensional bookstore, is a departure from such experimentation. Set in San Francisco and upstate New York near the turn of the millennium, it’s full of incident but largely old-fashioned in its telling. The narrator is a young computer programmer pulled away from California at the height of the dot-com bubble to sift through his recently deceased grandfather’s house in the fictional upstate town of Thebes, N.Y.

The book’s episodes in the Catskills wouldn’t be out of place in a Richard Russo novel, and the evocation of the dot-com era captures the zeitgeist without strangling it to death, lacking the heavy-handed cultural signposting of, say, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Having been raised in Thebes by his mother and her sister (he refers to them as “my mothers”), the narrator is spurred to remember his upbringing and the mysterious story of his father, a lawyer with a rebellious streak who came through town in the 1960s and then disappeared. He also happens upon Yesim, a Turkish-American childhood flame who may or may not be reigniting, and spends time flipping through a book his grandfather read to him when he was a child: Progress in Flying Machines, a real-life book published in 1894, a “catalog of failures” that extensively detailed experiments in human flight up to that time. The ungainly flying contraptions are one of several elements in Luminous Airplanes that subtly speak to the tragedy of visionaries, the way their ideas can inspire and enchant but still be wrong or dangerous or simply and sadly lost forever. Imagining the fate of his grandfather’s books, and all the ideas inside them, the narrator writes: “More likely the books would be pulped. They would dissolve in a slurry of acids, fall fiber from fiber, until not a word of their advice remained, then they would be put together again in a new shape, cradling white, unbroken eggs.”

The online material takes this already kaleidoscopic story many steps further. It includes extensions of scenes from the book, and also follows the story into the future. From the new material that’s already up, it’s clear that Mr. La Farge’s more playful side is running free online, collapsing the space between the reader and the narrator, who is now very self-consciously addressing us.

Clicking “help” on the website, for example, you find a passage that starts like this: “My god, you think you need help? You’re not the one sitting in his room in New Haven, Connecticut, right now, wondering what the hell happened to your life.” Elsewhere, the narrator bristles at the idea that his tributaries of text are comparable to the Choose Your Own Adventure series: “Every time I tell someone that I am working on a hypertext that branches in many different directions, they say, ‘Oh, like those books where you turn to page 45 if you open the treasure chest.’” This tone is jarringly different from the book, where the narrator is more confessional at some points than at others, but mostly has a traditional, sealed-off relationship to the reader.

“Direct address seemed like a natural way to proceed [online],” Mr. La Farge said, “because there are fewer layers between the writer and the reader—no editor, no publisher, no bookstore, just a kind of screen-to-screen contact, or at least the fantasy thereof.” Whether that address comfortably fits with the rest of the work, time will tell, but it makes clear that the website is not just a dump for B-roll footage; it’s a project all its own, distinct from the bound pages.

Mr. La Farge is launching his novel’s website against an industry-wide backdrop of, depending on your perspective, innovation or desperation. Conventional wisdom these days has books dead, with only the precise form of their afterlife left to be determined. Will they exist only as curios for art collectors? Will they simply migrate as is onto e-readers? Or will they be absorbed into other media in a way that makes the very idea of sustained reading antiquated?

A recently launched company called Booktrack sells customized soundtracks that add “synchronized music, sound effects and ambient sound to the text of your favorite e-books.” (Simply add visuals to that mix, and you’ve got a thrilling new invention called the movie.) Booktrack is not just meddling with contemporary books like those by James Frey, an early supporter of the company’s mission. It will also pump up the volume on such swooning classics as Pride and Prejudice and Romeo and Juliet, suggesting the venture could be a boon for the royalties of dewy alt-rock bands like Snow Patrol, if nothing else. The soundtrack “really … enhances your imagination,” Booktrack co-founder Paul Cameron recently told The New York Times, presumably with a straight face. For anyone who thinks the other way around—that one’s imagination should do the enhancing—times are tough.

On a more promising note, independent publisher Melville House recently introduced its line of “HybridBooks.” The name might conjure dreary images of books passing nights plugged in next to the Prius in the garage, but the product is a digital batch of smart material related to the book— maps, essays, historical facts, reviews—that can be enjoyed as obtrusively or unobtrusively as you like.

Ticking off influences for the project, Mr. La Farge cited mostly innovative books on paper, like Tristram Shandy, Pale Fire, and Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London, which he called “essentially a hypertext in print form.”

He avoids calling his own work hypertext, preferring the term “immersive text.” The word “hypertext” has already fallen largely out of circulation (Mr. La Farge first conceived of this project in 1999), and the use of the form for literary purposes has been spotty at best. “With the exception of Geoff Ryman’s excellent 253, [hypertext fiction is] mostly pretty tough going,” Mr. La Farge said. “I think the early enthusiasm for the technology might have given writers a feeling of needing to do less writing work, because the form would carry the work. Whereas my sense is that the opposite is true: you have to pay as much attention to the writing of a hypertext as you would to the writing of a novel, or more attention, really, because novels produce a kind of natural engrossment, whereas online you’re always struggling to hold the reader’s attention.”

Mr. La Farge offered his “highly uninformed prediction” about authors increasingly exploring the formal possibilities of e-books: “It’s like when people started making automobiles: first they looked like horseless carriages, then as people got comfortable with the new form, they started to do more of the things cars could do. But since the economic value of fiction is many orders of magnitude smaller than the economic value of the automobile, I’m guessing the transition will happen more slowly.”

In his own writing career, he is content to go slowly on the tech front. He doesn’t rule out the possibility of another digital foray, because “it’s a lot of fun … to be in the position where you get to ask yourself a lot of questions that writers don’t usually have occasion to ask.” But his next planned project is a novel set in the 1930s and 1960s, with no online component attached. For now, he waits to see what the world makes of his latest trick.

“I feel like one of the people who were trying to invent flying machines,” he said. “I’ve been futzing around in my workshop for 10 years or so, and now maybe I’ve got something that flies, or maybe I’ve got a giant steam-powered bat which is going to break into a thousand pieces the first time I turn it on.”

editorial@observer.com

RECENT STATEMENTS ABOUT THE STATE OF THE NOVEL: A SAMPLE
1976. The New York Review of Books publishes "American Plastic" by Gore Vidal: "The New Novel is close to forty years old." Mr. Vidal views its origin as Sarraute's Tropisms (1938) and reviews the oeuvres of the four writers whom, two years earlier, Donald Barthelme said were the only Americans worth reading. (Mr. Vidal says in a footnote: "I am told that Mr. Barthelme later, sensibly, denied having made such an exclusive pronouncement.") These include William Gass, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and--aberrantly--Grace Paley, "a plain short-story writer" of whom Mr. Vidal "got a good deal of pleasure from reading," contrary to the others: "I am obliged to remark upon the sense of suffocation one experiences reading so much bad writing." The 11,254-word essay quotes Mr. Barth as "sensibly," in Mr. Vidal's view, saying that "the permanent changes in fiction from generation to generation more often have been, and are more likely to be, modifications of sensibility and attitude rather than dramatic innovations in form and technique."

1985. Mississippi Review publishes an entire issue--"On the New Fiction"--of essays about writers whose work Kim Herzinger describes in the introduction: "If 'minimalist' fiction is 'about' anything, it seems often to be about 'endurance,' tracing the collision of the anarchic self and its inexplicable desires with the limitations imposed by life in the world, with special attention paid to that moment when the self confronts its limitations and decides to keep going."

1986. Harper's Magazine publishes "Less Is Less" by Madison Smartt Bell who says "minimalist" writing has oversaturated the market and exhibits a "steadily deterministic, at times nihilistic, vision of the world." He blames, finally, to some degree, publishers--for publishing these "minimalists." Mary Robison is fully, somewhat bafflingly, praised (perhaps to give the illusion that the essay isn't personal taste stated as objective rule) because, Mr. Bell says, she "departs from the trend by allowing her characters freedom."

1986. The New York Times publishes "A Few Words about Minimalism" by John Barth who, at Johns Hopkins, was a teacher of "minimalists" Frederick Barthelme (Mississippi Review editor, 1978 to 2010) and Ms. Robison. Mr. Barth says "the history (and the microhistories) of literature and of art in general" is of cyclical corrections, "a cycle to be found as well, with longer rhythms, in the history of philosophy, the history of the culture," and that "between minimalism and its opposite, I pity the reader--or the writer, or the age--too addicted to either to savor the other."

1988. The New York Times publishes "On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Beans" by Frederick Barthelme as a response, in part, to negative charges against minimalism "in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire and all the literary mags; one can't read a book review these days without encountering the obligatory attack on 'minimalist' prose (even in USA Today)." Mr. Barthelme says he and others were most interested in Hawkes, Gass, Barth, Donald Barthelme (his older brother) for a time in the '60s but at some point "started looking around for other things to do" and saw John Cheever, Jean Rhys, Joan Didion and 26 others. "It was a wonderful world," says Mr. Barthelme.

1989. Harper's publishes "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" by Tom Wolfe: "Unless some movement occurs in American fiction over the next ten years that is more remarkable than any detectable right now, the pioneering in nonfiction will be recorded as the most important experiment in American literature in the second half of the twentieth century." Mr. Wolfe cites Emile Zola's Germanal (1885) as inspiration and example. Wolfe summarizes "minimalists" in two sentences: "Anesthetic solitude became one of the great motifs of serious fiction in the 1970s. The Minimalists, also known as the K-Mart Realists, wrote about real situations, but very tiny ones, tiny domestic ones, for the most part, usually in lonely Rustic Septic Tank Rural settings, in a deadpan prose composed of disingenuously short, simple sentences."

1990. Harper's solicits responses to Mr. Wolfe and publishes letters from T. Coraghessan Boyle ("calling Robert Coover a Minimalist is like calling Attila the Hun a man of peace") and John Hawkes, who says Mr. Wolfe quoted him around 15 years out of context and that the quotation, which he said around 40 years ago--that "the true enemies of the novel" were plot, setting, character--was "an extravagance used to make a point." Hawkes also says Mr. Coover isn't a minimalist and that "[Wolfe] does us all a severe disservice by creating a distorted historical perspective" and ends his letter, and the issue of Harper's, with an anecdote: "Once, when John Barth and I were together in Austin, Texas, it was rumored that James Michener, a documentary writer beyond a doubt, had said that if he could have an alternate route as a writer, he would choose to be his own opposite--some double version of Barth/Hawkes. It's a curious statement and I can't vouch for its truth. But would that Wolfe had such openmindedness."

2002. The New Yorker publishes "Mr. Difficult" by Jonathan Franzen about William Gaddis.

2005. Harper's publishes "A Correction" by Ben Marcus who defends the kind of writing he says Mr. Franzen has been frequently disparaging in venues with much larger readerships than his targets.

2007. Harper's publishes "Literary Entrails" by Cynthia Ozick who summarizes Mr. Marcus' usage in "A Correction" of the Fog Index to discern that Franzen's "Mr. Difficult" actually requires a higher skill level to read than passages from novels by Gaddis. "Still, it is Gaddis, Marcus gloats, who, for all his simpler words and shorter sentences, remains the more complex writer. So: a punch in the eye for Franzen! The Crips and the Bloods would feel right at home in this alley," says Ms. Ozick. "The real problem here lies not in what is happening. But what is not happening. [paragraph break] What is not happening is literary criticism." Ms. Ozick then defines literary criticism as based upon connectedness: "No reviewer had thought to set Beloved beside Philip Roth's The Plot Against America." To do so might create an "innate kinship, a backdrop, the white noise of the era that claims us all," says Ms. Ozick, that would allow Franzen-Marcus, and others, to exist in a manner "less antagonistic than inquisitively receptive."

2008. The New York Review of Books publishes "Two Paths for The Novel" by Zadie Smith who reviews Netherland and Remainder in a manner hewing closely to Ms. Ozick's idea of literary criticism, though perhaps less inquisitive than antagonistic: "All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads. [...] These aren't particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked." Ms. Smith seems to disapprove of Netherland mostly because it is, in her metaphor, on a road that currently has too many people/cars on it. "I have written in this tradition myself, and cautiously hope for its survival, but if it's to survive, lyrical Realists will have to push a little harder on their subjects," says Ms. Smith (I'm confused why she believes it might not survive if it's currently dominating the culture).

A summary of the above:

XX: Group A is bad.

Group A: [no response]

Group B: [inquisitive thoughts about itself]

YY: Group B is bad.

Group A: It's O.K. to like different kinds of writing.

Group B: It's O.K. to like different kinds of writing.

ZZ: Group B is "disingenuous."

Group B: [no response]

YY: I feel like YZ himself wouldn't read his last three novels.

ZZ: If YY doesn't enjoy YZ, that doesn't mean other people can't.

ZX: YY and YZ are behaving like opposing gangs because there isn't enough literary criticism happening.

ZY: Our culture is currently bad because one kind of writing--C, "lyrical realism"--is dominating.

Group C: [no response]

Those "complaining," or "on the attack," seem to operate with an amount of generalization and judgment and omission that their targets feel reluctant or unwilling to engage with directly (and that every participant, I feel, would likely want to avoid in their fiction), resulting in a comically uneven, at times suddenly directionless, almost zanily halfhearted narrative.

Interestingly, and touchingly, to me, Group A and Group B--despite being very different, most would agree, I think, in terms of their fiction--consistently expressed support and appreciation for each other. 

WHAT DIFFERENT KINDS OF NOVEL ACTUALLY EXIST?
Humans simultaneously exist in and experience (1) the world of phenomenon, or concrete reality, which is shared with other humans and discerned with the five senses (touch, sight, etc.) and has physical laws such as cause/effect and gravity and (2) the world of noumenon or abstraction, which cannot be discerned with the five senses, does not have physical laws, and is where memories and thoughts and feelings--and novels--originate and exist.

Although each human's world of noumenon is unique and private--direct access by others is impossible--the world of noumenon is theorized, or hoped, it seems, by most religions and philosophies, to be actually a oneness within which we become isolated when we take on physical form and enter concrete reality, which, like a virtual world, is a shared space in which we can communicate our worlds of noumenon with others, if we want to and at our leisure, until we return to the oneness upon death. It's unknown why we don't exist only in the world of noumenon but are forced to endure, or perhaps gifted--though vaguely, almost mischievously--an amount of time, between birth and death, in concrete reality.

To articulate and discuss this mystery, and to do (1) and (2) below, humans have--through a kind of baton-passing, over hundreds of generations--developed different noises (and symbols for these noises) with functionally agreed-upon meanings. We begin learning these noises immediately upon birth and use them (1) to convey rhetoric for purposes of satisfying desires created by evolution and (2) to describe our secret worlds of noumenon to others for purposes of reducing loneliness, relieving boredom, increasing excitement. Single sentences ("I feel confused") or words ("Jesus") or dialogues can do this, to a certain degree, as can--to those who feel unsatisfied with verbal communication because of social anxieties or persisting feelings of loneliness/misunderstanding or simply a desire to communicate more accurately or elaborately--poems, short stories, essays, novels.

Novels--and memoirs--are perhaps the most comprehensive reports humans can deliver, of their private experiences, to other humans. In these terms there is only one kind of novel: a human attempt to transfer or convey some part or version of their world of noumenon to another's world of noumenon.

WHAT, THEN, IS THE FUTURE OF THE NOVEL?
Because humans, as a species sharing DNA, are able to think and feel similar things--to a degree that if we don't understand another human we discern our confusion as cultural, I.Q.-based or that the other person is "insane"--and because novels describe and exist in the world of noumenon, where thoughts and feelings exist, all novels, I think, will, on a certain level, seem invariably familiar. In concrete reality we might feel shocked if a physical law is broken--if someone time-travels, communicates telepathically, displays other "magical" behavior--but in the world of noumenon there are no physical laws, or equivalent structures, to transgress.

Knowing this, I don't feel attracted to defining the "future" of the novel as the actualization of imaginable ideas--a novel by a robot presented to the public as by a human; a novel impossible for a human to complete in a lifetime; a novel by a poverty-stricken person from a third-world country from the perspective of an upper-middle-class character from a first-world country of similar racial heritage--but as something categorically not imaginable, something that if imagined wouldn't be the future of the novel but simply another predictably unique novel.

For a novel not to seem familiar, in this definition, it would have to be the articulation of a thought or feeling that's currently impossible to conceive of thinking or feeling, which could perhaps be made possible only by a change in DNA--if humankind moved genetically reptileward, over millions of years, slowly losing aspects of consciousness and capacities for language--or maybe something like if consciousness, as a physically immeasurable and therefore unpredictable somethingness, disappeared suddenly, as if by a binary change in the "settings" of the universe. Maybe that would cause an unfamiliarly incomprehensible change--or "future," in my definition--for the novel. But from that perspective my current perspective couldn't be comprehended, as there would be no "past" to actuate a future; it's impossible, in this view, for the novel to have a future.

Thinking of novels in this manner, I feel more receptive to the world of noumenon. I feel closer both to nothingness--to the oneness--and to other humans. I feel less pressured to consider, engage with or respond to the development or advancement of the novel than to undistractedly view each possible novel as uniquely occupying an area on something spherical (like how humans on a round Earth don't feel able to "advance" by walking in the correct direction, unlike they would in a side-scrolling video game or flat world, unless they've self-defined a goal like to live in Manhattan, but are required to be "productive" in other ways), where, though, as conscious beings with urges created by evolution, the default mode of perception is to distort it into a line, to discern an illusion of progress or direction. But if art is anything, then it is, to me, that which is created in the attempted absence of illusions, that which doesn't instruct because its creator while creating it doesn't know what's good or bad, only that he/she wants to convey something.

Therefore I currently feel most interested in reading/writing novels that aren't improvements on or innovations of other novels. I want to view each potential novel as already definitively and unavoidably unique, improvable only in comparison to itself and then only from its creator's singular perspective. I want to learn about another human's unique experience from reports they've made themselves while excitedly aware that they alone, regardless of what others are thinking or doing, have access to what they're reporting upon. I do, sometimes--rarely, I think--want to know, "What do you think other people are going to be thinking about in 20 years?" or "How do you feel humankind, generally, is going to feel like in 50 or 100 years?" But mostly I want to know, "What are you thinking about?" and "How do you feel?"

editorial@observer.com

Karen Russell's first novel, Swamplandia!, is one of those books that pushes these questions to the front of your mind while you read it. Her creative impulses seduce at first, but soon after, they bewilder. Ms. Russell's virtues come at the peril of her vices. She constructs compact, gemlike images that you hoard with your pen-starring adjective-noun pairings, underlining glittery little phrases. Ms. Russell turns you into a magpie, a reader with a greedy eye for shiny sentences. Buzzards are "tumor-headed," palms are "toothy," knees are "small and white as clams." It's a lush life she depicts-a mythologized Florida of gnarled mangroves, swamp violets, orchids and dinosaur weather. Ms. Russell's verbal ground is loamy and fragrant, but like the tropical soil of her setting, it's nutrient-poor, leached of minerals by the neon flowers and superfoods that grow there. Her specificity is sometimes exhausting, her quirkiness (that exclamation point!) tiresome. The particulars she deals in are inconceivably weird, like those of an anime plot, but they come embedded in a matrix that lacks real characters with whom we might empathize.

Swamplandia! is narrated by Ava Bigtree, a teenage girl whose family owns the novel's eponymous theme park on a remote island where her deceased mother was an alligator wrestler. The extended family lives in esoteric isolation, weather-proofing the tourist attractions and training for their theatrical battles with the alligators. Ava, her sister, Ossie, and her brother, Kiwi, don't go to school, but she and her siblings know the intricacies of their local ecosystem and how to pacify ferocious reptiles. The family business is barely sustainable, and the children live in a state of constant half-mourning for their mother. When Ossie falls in love with a ghost, Louis Thanksgiving, and follows him to the underworld, Ava sets off to track her down, meeting a menagerie of eccentrics on her way. 

Ms. Russell remains astute to the necessity of balancing the phantom lovers and surreal names with concrete banalities and doses of verisimilitude. Ms. Russell writes a sort of dirty magic realism; the details are fey and fantastical, but her narrative solutions are hardboiled. We learn that Ava's mother died not of some occult ailment or by some supernatural disaster, but of plain old cancer: "Her head got soft and bald like a baby's head. We had to watch her sink into her own face. Hilola Jane Bigtree, world-class alligator wrestler, terrible cook, mother of three, died in a dryland hospital bed in West Davey on an overcast Wednesday, March 10, at 3:12 pm." This information, this data, doesn't come to us particularly early in the novel or as mere exposition. It's hard not to resent a surplus of specific details that yields such a deficit of specific feelings. Ava admits to indulging in magical thinking about her mother's death. "Somehow," she confesses, "I had worked it out in my mind to where I could believe in our mother without having to believe in ghosts exactly." Ms. Russell demands that we, like Ava, mentally maintain a sort of semi-delusion while reading Swamplandia!, trusting that mentions of hospice care, scientists from the University of Florida and Dwight D. Eisenhower will suspend our disbelief.

Ms. Russell, who is from Miami, does not invent this world for superficial reasons. The Florida coastline she describes reads like an organic exaggeration of her home. She is devoted to her language and setting, and she clearly takes pleasure in the act of writing. "Nights in the swamp were dark and star-lepered," she writes, and you get the sense that this is a description Ms. Russell's held in her mind for years. Similarly: "The wet season was a series of land-versus-water skirmishes, marl turned to chowder and shunted the baby-green cocopalms into the sea; tides manically revised the coastlines." Like Joan Didion's California or Hunter S. Thompson's Las Vegas, Ms. Russell's fictionalized Florida is based on a set of already fantastic real-life premises. With its subtropical climate and exotic flora and fauna, Florida, a peninsula, sticks out of the country like a sore thumb. It has the highest mortgage delinquency rate in the nation, and a large percentage of the state is now owned by the federal government. At 345 feet, Britton Hill, Fla., is the lowest high-point of any U.S. state. But Swamplandia!, Ava tells us, is far below sea level, one of those nice facts of fiction that automatically fabulizes a place. The Bigtrees, with their obsolete theme park and mystical beliefs, are mortals in a metaphorical underworld; the swamp is their River Styx.

Unfortunately for us, Ms. Russell's whimsy does not scale. Swamplandia! arrives three years on the heels of St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, the story collection from which this novel sprang. (One of the stories, "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," is the novel's original kernel.) Both books share Ms. Russell's preoccupations with place and adolescence, but the short stories are ultimately more successful. In all her writing, Ms. Russell inspects her own inventions with a jeweler's loupe, with a keen eye for unexpected facets and linguistic clarity. But the microscopic attention comes at the expense of an imaginative universe that feels worth just so much of our time. If you're a reader susceptible to the fear that fiction might just be silly enterprise, stay away. You can love a book in incremental units-some inventive diction here, a luscious sentence there-knowing all the while that these annotatable attributes are not all that fortifying. For now, at least, Ms. Russell is better when writing short stories, where she can splash us with colorful language and dunk us in deranged dimensions, where we can enter the fun house and then get the hell out.

editorial@observer.com

The entire operation is indebted to the same things that inspire so many other feats of derring-do: boredom, excessive champagne, and an overwhelming infatuation with another man's spectacles. Inspired by all three, Fletcher scrawled a ransom note with a pen from the bar, and in the midst of some distracting chatter, nicked the glasses from Franzen's face. 

Then, the chase began.

After a few seconds I was already escaping through muddy grass and over sharp metal fences. I thought my freedom had been earned and held my prize in the air shouting and laughing with joy until I realised how many members of the security team wanted them back and, perhaps more importantly, to teach me not to damage their reputation as I felt I'd done. I ran towards the Serpentine Lake - my only route. As I approached it, senselessly and at some speed, I decided to cut through it and I dismantled my BlackBerry so that the circuits wouldn't short. I then ran into the water, wading quickly though the lake along the bank and into thick vegetation. I realised that the copy of Franzen's book that I'd helped myself to was also floating away and I eventually found myself almost shoulder-deep in the water under the branch of a tree, where I stayed for some time.

Just picture the copy of Freedom, a casualty of the heist, floating slowly away from the our hero-culprit. Priceless.

When the helicopters came, Fletcher was as surprised as any sensible human being would have been — "An airborne vehicle with infrared capabilities to track a suspect who'd stolen a pair of glasses?" — but he was on the lam, so he wouldn't let this total absurdity faze him. He treated the whole incident like the frivolity that it was, and when he was caught he even congratulated the officer on his work. 

To his credit, the usually super-serious Franzen seems to be taking the whole ordeal in good spirits. He told NPR yesterday that he would not be pressing charges against Fletcher, and insisted he kept his cool while representatives from the publisher were freaking the fuck out. "I've been laughing about the whole thing," the Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying on NPR, "and observing the anguish secondhand."

Fletcher also wanted to make it clear that he has no malice toward Franzen. In fact, he stole the glasses out of admiration. "He is one of the most talented writers out there and I have the utmost respect for the man," he said of the novelist.

To some people, it seems, holding a pair of glasses hostage is the highest form of flattery. 

nfreeman@observer.com

Twitter: @NFreeman1234

Today, Laura Miller argues in a Salon piece that the inferiority of the novels the two Philips are attacking is more due to their other deficiencies than simply their tenses.

Yes, young writers are prone to believing that techniques "calling attention to" the unreliability of storytelling itself are far more daring, innovative and interesting than they actually are. But like other carped-about trends (minimalism, incest as a plot point, short stories ending in an "epiphany," etc.), the present tense is only one among any number of crutches clung to by mediocre writers, usually because they've seen other, more talented writers use them to advantage. 

But to Pullman, who wrote the ever-popular His Dark Materials children's books, the present tense itself is enough to turn any novel, regardless of how decent it is, into nothing but an exercise in affectation and trend-stalking. "This wretched fad has been spreading more and more widely," he tells The Telegraph. "I can’t see the appeal at all."

This sentiment may be more than petty bickering for bickering's sake. The Observer transposed the first sentences of a few famous works from the past tense to the present, and they just didn't pack the same punch.

The Great Gatsby:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gives me some advice that I'm turning over in my mind ever since.

The Stranger:

Mother dies today.

A Tale of Two Cities:

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times...

Perhaps these British writers are on to something! Let's hope the Booker Prize doesn't go to a novel written in that gauche, terrible present tense. A win for the past tense would be a win for the English language.