10:01: Beginning the Discussion

Three of us will be throwing some ideas around at each other for the next few days about 10:01 by Lance Olsen, the book The Rake (Traver) nominated for this quarter's Read This! selection. We hope lots of other people will chime in in the comments to the posts, because reactions to this book have been quite varied.

Ed sent out some questions to get us started, and I'd like to tackle one of them right now, then offer one of my own. I should note also that Ed and Traver enjoyed the book much more than I did, although, despite my reservations about it as a whole, there are pages of it I think are magnificent.

Anyway, here's one of Ed's question to us:

"10:01" reminded me a good deal of Nicholson Baker's work in the way that it dared to cram so much of its feeilngs about the world within its tiny frame. With postmodernism dead and Baker's reputation secured but wildly argued about, what hope is there for the "metainformational novel?" Does such a book have a place or is it just some literary stunt?

I have to admit that I haven't read any of Baker's fiction, though I'm certainly aware of it. What this book reminded me of again and again, and to its detriment, was Geoff Ryman's 253, which started out as hypertext and eventually was published. 253 can be both (or alternately) tedious and addictive, but I generally feel that the writing is better than in 10:01, perhaps because it is less intent on creating various voices, a technique I find cloying unless the writer is a particular sort of ventriloquistic genius. Comparing the two works is unfair on the whole, though, because they are quite different, but that's one of the dangers that comes with writing a book primarily driven by its structural concept -- it begins to look a lot like other books primarily driven by their structural concepts.

The problem is for these sorts of books to rise above being a great concept. Basically, they're gimmicky. Sometimes the gimmick is interesting enough to hold our interest, but in 10:01's case, there's not enough going on other than the gimmick for it to have the kind of resonance and complexity that other novels have. That's not to say the form couldn't work brilliantly in the hands of someone who had more to convey than, in Olsen's case, rather banal observations about contemporary life (it's kind of like DeLillo Lite). I wouldn't blame the form, but rather this particular iteration.

I sound like I hated the book. I didn't. It fell right in the middle for me among these nominations, and I didn't find it particularly painful to read. I just thought there were a lot of good opportunities that the writer wasted -- it seemed like a book with the possibility of greatness.

And now for a question for Ed and Traver, who liked the book more than I did: What did you find pleasurable here? How, for you, did it rise above being a promising exercise? In other words, what am I missing?

Comments

[Kassia]

My reaction to 10:01 was similar, though for different reasons. At first, I felt as if I'd fallen into a writing exercise (you're in a movie theater, describe one of your fellow movie-goers, okay now describe what's happening an hour later). Once I stopped worrying about the story and started just enjoying the, as you call it, gimmick, I started having a good time.

Your comment about the different voices was interesting because that aspect (mostly) worked for me.

[derikb]

Matt, it made me think of Ryman's 253 also.

I think where the book wasn't working for me was I felt a distinct lack of connection. There felt to be no thread connecting everything beyond the location, which in itself can work (Alan Moore's amazing Voice of the Fire is based around a locational structure), but here the oh so very short sections felt too much like the dreaded short story novel (one of our other selections I think...).

[TEV]

Hey Matt,

I know you're looking for 10:01 boosters but I do fall into the opposite camp - I liked it the least of the five books we read. But for me, the failure of 10:01 is a failure of language. Each of us has different literary priorities but language is front and center for me, and I found the language in 10:01 to be more or less consistently uninivolving. I've had my struggles with Baker, to be sure, but he can write a truly magnificent sentence. I don't find evidence of similar gifts in this book.

[Inversiones en petroleo]

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