The stories nested within stories within stories sometimes makes for a challenging read. The layers peel back and forth so that sometimes the reader struggles to figure out which level of the story he is on. Murnane references previous details in the story by making the reader count the paragraphs he has just read backwards as markers. “I reported at the end of the fifth paragraph before the previous paragraph that I was often afraid of the character known as Aunt Bee.” Murnane also blends nonfiction and fiction, all the while claiming that everything is fiction. “I should remind the reader that every sentence hereabouts is part of a work of fiction.” Maybe it is and the reader should take him at his word. The narrator of this novel is never Murnane, the author, but just a fictional character in this novel. Perhaps.
This novel is a meditation on the monkish practice of reading and writing fiction well. “Many years passed before I began to understand that looking at line after line of text is only a small part of reading; that I might need to write about a text before I could say that I had fully read it.” Murnane’s thoughts, at first, seem like they might be a little bit off. “Several times while I was writing the previous pages, I recalled the statement: fiction is the art of suggestion. This statement allows me to suppose that a person without imagination might still succeed in writing fiction so long as his or her reader is able to imagine.” He sometimes less than subtly interjects his opinions on what constitutes good fiction. “I have long forgotten whether or not the narrator of The Glass Spear was one of those unconvincing personages commonly occurring in fiction of the twentieth century: those narrators who claim to know the thoughts and feelings of more than one character in the work of fiction.” Murnane’s novel also tries to get at the heart of what fiction is all about. “During all the years while I had been a reader of fiction and while I had sometimes struggled to write fiction—during all those years, I had wanted to learn what places appeared in the mind of one or another fictional character whenever he or she stared past the furthest places mentioned in the text that had seemed to give rise to him or to her; what places such a character thought of during the hours or the days that were never reported in the text; what places such a character dreamed about…. Now, I was free to suppose what I had often suspected: many a so-called fictional character was not a native of some or another fictional text but of a further region never yet written about…. Now, I was justified in believing in the existence of places beyond the places that I had read about or had written about: of a country on the far side of fiction…. I understood for the first time that a personage mentioned in a work of fiction is capable of devising a seeming territory more extensive and more detailed by far than the work itself.” It sometimes all blurs together and gets very meta. “I find myself now in a strange situation. Nearly sixteen years ago, I stopped writing fiction. A few years later, I wrote a piece of fiction intended to explain why I had so stopped. Now, more than ten years later again, I am trying to compose a passage of fiction that might explain my explanatory piece.” This novel is that fiction.
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