PEOPLE'S CHOICE LITERATURE

Comitta’s latest gives readers two very different novels to consider.

What are fiction readers actually looking for? It’s a question many authors and pundits have sought to answer, but few have consulted a wide-ranging survey and then set out to write two books. As the author explains, of the two novels here, there is “one containing everything that received the most votes in each question and another with everything that received the fewest or no votes.” The result is something akin to Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, but with more grieving FBI agents, cybernetic eyes, and occasional authorial asides. The Most Wanted Novel is about a young woman working for D.J., a tech CEO whose ambitious products mask a sinister agenda. Here, readers will encounter a utopian community on the site of Alcatraz, a murder committed by driverless car and “a black-light poster of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon signed ‘to D. J.’” If that all seems generic, well, that’s the point—and the self-consciously cliched narrative still has plenty of momentum. The Most Unwanted Novel is much longer, features a character named Lord Tickletext, werewolf firefighters, and a six-page passage listing all the books on a series of shelves. The author periodically explains the reasoning behind certain decisions: “Christmas? Tennis? Aristocrats? That’s right. No one wants to read about them. Or, more precisely, very few people want them when faced with other options.” It’s an occasionally bizarre reading experience, but it also feels like a funhouse mirror of both airport fiction and experimental literature. And if the whole thing feels at times like an ornate prank, at least Comitta embraces its absurdity wholeheartedly.

One of the strangest literary double features in recent memory.