From The X-Book Files

No, it’s not x-rated; it’s experimental.  S, by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst is a book within a book.  It exists only in old-fashioned hard copy for good reason.  The physical object is carefully crafted to look like a well-used library book with many handwritten margin notations.  The library book is ostensibly Ship of Theseus by V.M. Straka.  Straka (a fictional author of fiction) is a mysterious 20^th-century author whose very identity is in dispute by literary scholars (at least by the scholars in this book).  Nobody really knows who he was, but we do know he was tied to decades of political and literary turmoil, and that he was tied in some ways to a group of such figures known loosely as “S”.

The margin notes are written by two young adults, one a college senior, another an ex-graduate student.  They discover each other by accident through the physical object of the book.  Indeed they don’t even meet for some time, but they do leave the book in secret places for the other to pick up after adding more notes in the margin.  The notes are handwritten, and by taking into account the handwriting and the color of the writing, the reader can piece together the chronology of the notes.  A real conversation ensues in these notes, a conversation that turns into a loving relationship. In addition various freestanding documents are inserted in the text for our pleasure and illumination: postcards, handwritten letters, archival documents, newspaper clippings, etc.

So there are multiple simultaneous levels here:  the original Straka text, the accompanying documents, the mystery of the historical figure Straka, the longstanding scholarly debate over his identity (some of this in footnotes), and several layers of conversation between the two present-day young adults.  Ideally one would read the book several times:  first just the Straka text, then the footnotes, then one time through for each layer of handwritten annotation.  But it’s not a short book, and just getting through it once is an effort.  It takes a while to find a reading rhythm for this odd arrangement, so I couldn’t imagine going back through it all multiple times. In a way it was fun to read and juggle the layers all at the same time page by page.

Conspiracy theories abound; intrigue and danger (some imagined, some perhaps real) lurk around every corner. The atmosphere is intense. Complexity abounds in the form of multiple historical characters, multiple theories about what the author might have intended, and hidden codes in the text that the young adults gradually crack.  The Straka text provides lots of vague passages that the young adult annotate to express their feelings about themselves, their past, and each other. The connections between fictional text, historical past, and actual present events are very cleverly drawn.

But what’s missing is the richness of human experience and emotion.  We don’t really care much about the codes because they don’t unlock anything that matters to us.  Yes, pieces of the puzzle are revealed, but the larger puzzle seems to be made up almost entirely of mood and atmospherics.  We don’t much care which way the history turns out.  We do care a little about the present-day characters, but there is no direct narration about or from them.  It’s all indirect, like a hall of mirrors.  If the mirrors don’t reflect anything we care about, then the mirrors become an effective but shallow trick that fails to keep our attention.  The book has two authors.  That should be enough to tell us that this will not be a book with deeply personal insight.

Very clever and well worth a read, but don’t expect a fulfilling experience. I smiled many times. I was delighted by the clever interplay, but in the end I wanted more depth.  But experiments are experimental. They’re meant to give us new knowledge about how things might work. They don’t have to answer all the questions at once.  This is a hint at an interesting new approach to fiction.  Will it bear fruit?  Not for me to predict. For now I’ll say that cleverness isn’t enough here.  But maybe there’s a path forward from here.