"A reflection of something we're missing"

Okay. So.

Well.

Uhm.

Right: I've read Only Revolutions, by Mark Z. Danielewski, and I'm...

My thoughts are...

What I feel is...

See, it's like...

Well: I've read the book. I think I liked it. I definitely admire it. I believe, suspect, that I admired it more than I liked it, though at times I definitely, certainly, I think, really did like it a lot. And other times I admired it less than I did, on average, over all by the end.

The book...it's a tough nut to crack. It synthesizes lots of by-now traditional literary methods into a unique, inventive whole. In one respect, it furthers what "project" Danielewski might be said to have begun in House of Leaves--the fusing of experimental artistic techniques with popular gut-level story telling. The book begs us to ask where the hell he'll go next; but he can take his time going there, because you could easily spend an extremely long time looking at this book, picking it apart, putting it back together.

Beyond all that, I don't even know what to say. I don't even like most of what I have said. Yet there's so much you can start saying about it, even without knowing what you're trying to say, that you could easily, appropriately enough, run around yourself in circles for days on this one.

I kind of just want other people to say stuff so I can scoff at them for either not getting it or not getting it. So I'll probably go back and read all the reviews I can find and then do my fair share of scoffing. And then I'll bug all my friends about it until they succumb to peer pressure and read it themselves, so we can sit across coffee saying-not-saying who knows how much else about it. Because this much I think I can safely commit to: no 800 word book review can possibly do this novel justice. It's too different for that. It's too confrontational/conversational. It's something else; if fiction can be said to have a bleeding edge, this book is it.

(Or...not.)

(Maybe.)

(I don't know.)