Praise for theMystery.doc :
An Amazon Best Book of the Year (Mysteries and Thrillers)
“Sui generis genius.” —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Perfume River and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
“McIntosh is a slacker Proust, writing about the underclass of Spokane rather than the upper classes of Paris as he attempts to convert memories and experience into art . . . Art installation, performance piece, vision board: These are odd ways to describe a novel, but McIntosh clearly wants to update that old genre, to give it a postmodern makeover . . . At a time when most novels still resemble their Victorian forebears, it’s refreshing to encounter a novel that actually looks like a 21st-century production . . . a remarkable achievement.” —Steven Moore, Washington Post
“Perhaps the most useful way to think about theMystery.doc is as an experiential novel, one we live with (or through), rather than read . . . At the same time, it is surprisingly accessible for such a long book: not a critique of meaning so much as an evocation of meaning’s aftermath—an expression, in other words, of the chaotic culture in which we live . . . [McIntosh’s] predecessors include James Joyce, Marguerite Young, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, Karl Ove Knausgaard . . . It may seem strange to call a 1,660-page novel intimate, and yet this is what McIntosh is after, to mine the depths of a particular set of points of view.” —David L. Ulin, 4Columns
“The rhythm of reading it is a staccato beat, with occasional pauses to refresh. The book simulates the act of trying to read a book in 2017: readers are continually ‘distracted’ with text messages and digital alerts and bizarre images . . . More than just an amnesia thriller, it’s a story of a narrative trying to will itself to life . . . [a] big, ambitious novel that is actively trying to eat the world.” —Paul Constant, The Seattle Review of Books
“[W]ith his 1,600-page follow-up to 2003’s Well , [McIntosh] has sneakily mirrored our fragmented culture by cobbling together a miscellany of phone transcripts, lecture fragments, photos, blank pages, and a loose narrative about a writer trying to produce a literary masterpiece.” — Week
“McIntosh is one of the few who has successfully captured in print the shifting sands of the way we communicate today . . . a young visionary.” —Tom Mayer, Mountain Times
“A vast, beguiling . . . postmodern novel of ideas, misread intentions, and robots, told in words, pictures, symbols, and even blank pages . . . A sprawling yarn . . . Like kindred spirits William Vollmann and Mark Danielewski, McIntosh aspires to philosophy . . . Perplexing but often wonderful . . . Provocative and fascinating.” — Kirkus Reviews
“McIntosh’s second book (after Well ) is fourteen years in the making, an audacious, sprawling, messy, and aptly titled antinovel that rarely subscribes to a conventional narrative format. The volume is comprised largely of fragments of miscellaneous, seemingly arbitrary exchanges and entries from digital and analog sources, including emails and chats, voice and video recordings, photographs, film stills, lines of computer code, typographical symbols . . . A strange and unclassifiable work, which brings to mind visually stimulating projects like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. It will certainly find a following among fans of literary puzzles.”— Publishers Weekly
“This will get discussed as a big book—check out the page count.” — Library Journal
“Glued precariously together from the documentary fragments of a shattered culture and a fractured psyche, as with Eliot’s The Waste Land , Matthew McIntosh’s huge and riveting theMystery.doc stakes out its territory in the unbroken ground of a new and unsettling American century. Haunted the same way that contemporary life is haunted—by snapshots and forgotten emails; scraps of dialogue and movie stills—this brave and massively accomplished book is both a savage exorcism and a dazzling celebration of the novel and the human heart, each with their endless possibilities. A transfixing statement in a shimmering new language.” —Alan Moore, author of Jerusalem
“ theMystery.doc may seem capacious but is actually sly, shy, and precise, and Matthew McIntosh is ambitious in the good sense: he attempts something new, with new vitality, and at that, absolutely succeeds.” —Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba
09/15/2017
McIntosh's latest (after Well) is a hefty, ambitious foray into the frontier of the novel. The self-referential story is about a writer who wakes up to discover that he doesn't remember who he is, nor does he recognize his wife or neighbors. Wrapped around and through this premise are myriad, seemingly unrelated, sections, including documented real-life dialogs, instant message transcripts, 9/11 call logs, excerpts from Dante's Inferno, personal photos, movie stills, censored passages, and pages of symbols. As the book proceeds, the writer discovers unsavory details about his unknown self and his possible impending doom. This book succeeds in broadening the possibilities of fiction and blurring the boundaries of the form; the instant messaging passages in particular cleverly shed light upon this microcosm of communication. As with any risky venture, however, some elements are less successful than others; for instance, the photos have a minor impact compared to the more textual elements. VERDICT This work redefines the concept of the page-turner, exploring the field of uninterpreted meaning that gives power to the audience while requiring much more effort to parse, echoing Mark Danielewski's creative use of text but with a more exploded narrative. Recommended for intrepid readers. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]—Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA
2017-08-03
A vast, beguiling, but mixed-bag postmodern novel of ideas, misread intentions, and robots, told in words, pictures, symbols, and even blank pages.After a long absence following the 2003 publication of his ambitious but much shorter novel, Well, McIntosh returns with a sprawling yarn that at first plays with the conventions of the mystery genre; a writer awakens to find that he cannot remember who he is, while a beautiful woman asks gently, "You all right, babe? You look kind of dazed." He is even more puzzled to find a blank document on his computer—if it is indeed his computer in his own house—with the title "themystery.doc," which, a helpful friend reminds him, he has described as "a post-post-neo-modern mystery story." Shades of meta—and with a Schrödinger-ian dead cat to boot. If the reader isn't similarly dazed at this point, then he or she hasn't quite appreciated what's going on in a tableau as blurry as our protagonist's glassless vision. Now, why can't he remember where and who he is? One clue is that his head hurts—and, given the diet of drugs that flows through the book, it's small wonder, to say nothing of the spasms of violation and violence. Like kindred spirits William Vollmann and Mark Danielewski, McIntosh aspires to philosophy; one preoccupation is religion, with small lessons delivered here and there by characters like the plumber who snakes the drain while describing "a system of commerce which was run according to Christian principles," aspirationally called "Kingdom of Heaven, Incorporated, International." It being a mystery, the angel of death hovers always in the wings, with tabloid-ish news flashes, photos of the twin towers collapsing, and so forth to remind us of our mortality—and, it seems, our vulnerability in the face of the helpful bots ("Hello, I am Michele, I am the website greeter") who pepper these pages. Perplexing but often wonderful; while some of this seems written in a self-indulgent private code, what is accessible can be provocative and fascinating.
