Writers of short stories have often tried to present their collections as pseudo-novels. This is a time-honored tradition of American fiction, practiced by William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Ray Bradbury and others. Publishing industry biases no doubt contribute to the charade, given the conventional wisdom that books of short stories sell poorly.
But a different trend is now on the rise in contemporary fiction. Authors are presenting us with fractured, splintered novels that aim to evoke the discontinuity of a short story collection. The goal lines have been reversed, and instead of aspiring to a holistic narrative unity, whether real or contrived, writers are increasingly favoring a style of disjunction and juxtaposition.
The most prominent example this new state of affairs is David Mitchell’s masterful Cloud Atlas (2004), a book that is structured more like a musical composition, with different movements and tempos, than a traditional novel. Other noteworthy ‘fractured novels’ of the new millennium include T.C. Boyle's When the Killing's Done (2011), Geraldine Brooks's People of the Book (2008), Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists (2010), David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011), Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero (2007), Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), and David Gordon’s The Serialist (2011). And now, we must add to this list Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men —a work that, like several of the above, mixes judicious doses of genre elements into a book that, nonetheless, will never get shelved in the sci-fi section of the library.
These books are not short story collections masquerading as novels. In the final analysis, they do cohere as unified works, but in a prickly, elusive way. Like a cracked mirror, these fractured novels still present us with a single big picture, even while threatening to break away into isolated, incommensurable fragments. This shift in fiction reminds me of the comparable change in philosophy and theory during the 1980s, when the systematizers went out of favor, and the anti-systematizers came to the fore. Goodbye Marx, Hegel, Sartre, Husserl. Hello Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Put away your Northrop Frye and take up your Roland Barthes. Dialectic exits stage left; deconstruction enters stage right. Now the novel is following this same path, jettisoning an idealized unity in favor of an alluring multiplicity.
The coherence in Kunzru’s Gods Without Men is provided by three large rocks jutting out of the ground in the desert. This might seem an unpromising nexus point for a novel, but Kunzru’s landscape is far from ordinary. I've heard friends of mine, who are more sensitive to such matters, enthuse over the "high places" they have visited—and they are not referring to the elevation above sea level or the offices of the rich and powerful. They are describing certain geographical locales where an intangible spiritual resonance can be felt, a metaphysical force that defies precise definition or explanation, but which seems to emanate from the spot. These kinds of high places would include Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Delphi, Ayers Rock, and various other destinations of pilgrimages and vision quests.
If the geography here is compact, the timeline is expansive. Gods Without Men is a chronological jumble. A chapter set in 1942 is followed by a lengthy section that takes place 2009, which is followed in turn by diary entries from 1775. Kunzru demonstrates considerable virtuosity in changing narrative voice and prose style every few pages. A section about a British rocker is filled with cockney slang, while a military dispatch from the 18th century is wrapped up in the decorum and protocols of the period. Yet there is nothing flashy or ostentatious about these modulations. Each separate storyline is presented with total commitment and authenticity, and the pieces in this literary jigsaw puzzle are allowed to fit together naturally without forcing.
People travel to the Pinnacles—three columns of rock that rise into southwestern desert air like "the tentacles of some ancient creature"—for many purposes, but what they find there is often something quite different from what they sought. Both visions and hallucinations haunt this landscape. During the course of the three centuries covered in Kunzru’s novel, his desert locale is the setting for a UFO encounter, a hippie commune, a criminal manhunt, a missionary’s vision, a kidnapping, a military investigation, sacrifices and redemptions of various kinds, and other incidents, both strange and banal.
Few novels embrace a more disparate collection of subplots. My two favorite threads in this tapestry involve the aforementioned rock star, who breaks up with the band and heads off into the desert to reboot his life, and a much different narrative about a MIT mathematician working on a Wall Street financial model that seems to have become a "god in the machine," a black box capable of moving markets and bringing together the most incommensurable elements into a single overarching framework. By the way, the latter bit of artificial intelligence could serve as a metaphor for Kunzru's whole book.
Sometimes the events that take place at the Pinnacles are inexplicable. Unusual powers seem to be at work here. Yet just as often, those who come to the spot seeking a transcendent experience leave disillusioned or disappointed. Kunzru doesn’t aim to clarify or reconcile, and that is one of the reasons why this novel never falls into the clichés of genre fiction. He realizes that the raw power of his story is enhanced by its inherent mysteries and paradoxes. Trying to ‘explain’ the Pinnacles would be akin to those pat explanations of Stonehenge or the Pyramids, clumsy attempts to reduce the splendor of the metaphysical to a series of claustrophobically empirical observations.
This is a significant book, both in its own right but also as a sign of the changes afoot in contemporary fiction. So much of what is most provocative or engaging in today's literary scene is exemplified in these pages: the return of plotting and storytelling as constitutive elements in narrative strategies; the infusion of liberating genre elements into cutting-edge fiction; the frictive charge of contrasting cultures engaging in conflict and collaboration. What Kunzru has delivered is one-of-a-kind, yet it is also a book that I would recommend to someone who wanted to read a single novel that represented the current moment in modern fiction.
Even when all its stories are told, Gods Without Men leaves us with more questions than answers. That may be why this novel, which seems to disregard the tenets of literary realism, comes across as far more true to life than those books in which the mysterious is hidden behind an wall of unmitigated plausibility. If so, the new ‘fragmented novel’ may owe its appeal not to any passing literary trend or piquant experimental quality, but to its ability to grasp levels of human experience that a more streamlined, ‘coherent’ narrative could never reach.
Ted Gioia's latest book is The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire .