Synopses & Reviews
With praise from Rachel Kushner and Alan Moore, a groundbreaking novel told in an exciting new form, mixing fiction, memoir, prose poetry, and textual art, exploring birth, death, the Internet, and the writing life as they play out in contemporary America and telling the story of a man who wakes up one morning not knowing who he is.
Funny, highly inventive, and deeply moving, theMystery.doc is a vast, shapeshifting literary novel that reads like a page-turner. It's a comedy, a tragedy, a big book about America. It's unlike anything you've read before.
Rooted in the western United States in the decade post-9/11, the book follows a young writer and his wife as he attempts to write the follow-up to his first novel, searching for a form that will express the world as it has become, even as it continually shifts all around him. Pop-up ads, search results, web chats, snippets of conversation, lines of code, and film and television stills mix with alchemical manuscripts, classical works of literature--and the story of a man who wakes up one morning without any memory of who he is, his only clue a single blank document on his computer called themystery.doc. From text messages to The Divine Comedy, first love to artificial intelligence, the book explores what makes us human--the stories we tell, the memories we hold on to, the memories we lose--and the relationships that give our lives meaning.
Part love story, part memoir, part documentary, part existential whodunit, theMystery.doc is a modern epic about the quest to find something lasting in a world where everything--and everyone--is in danger of slipping away.
Review
“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
Review
“Sui generis genius.” Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Perfume River and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Review
"This is 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
Synopsis
Thirteen years in the making, theMystery.doc is a 1,700-page shape-shifting novel that is unlike any book that has ever been published before. Mixing image, textual art, and interlacing plot lines, it transcends the limits of genre and form to create a highly inventive, often hilarious, and deeply moving work, which brilliantly reflects the times in which we live and the ways in which we consume and are consumed by information in the digital age.
Rooted in the western United States in the decade post-9/11, the book follows a young writer and his wife as he attempts to write his second book, a national epic he hopes will endure forever, and as he searches for a form that will express the world as it has become, revealing the interconnectedness of all our lives. Pop-up ads, internet search results, spam, lines of code, and film and television stills mix with canonical works of literature, alchemical manuscripts, transcripts of personal conversations, and the story of a man who wakes up one morning not knowing who he is, a blank document called themystery.doc newly appeared on his computer. Part love story, part prose poem, part documentary, part existential whodunit, part future-fiction, part bildungsroman, part memoir, theMystery.doc is about the quest to find something lasting in a world where everything is in danger of slipping away. Love, loss, birth, death, technology, terrorism, and the American Dream come together to form a great symphonic work that dazzles in both its structure and in its deep emotional resonance.
About the Author
Matthew McIntosh is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller Well. He lives with his wife on the West Coast.