It seems safe to say that more writers have access to more book publishers than at any other time in literary history. While "mainstream" publishing is still dominated by only a few big publishers, copious numbers of independent presses make available the work of writers who in previous eras likely would not have been published. Although some of this increase can be attributed to the concurrent development (at least in the United States) of university creative writing programs and their need for publication credits, surprisingly little of the work to be found through independent presses seems merely perfunctory, without discernible literary merit. Indeed, the existence of these presses has almost certainly made available to readers works of fiction (and poetry as well) that in their departures from the more constrained practices reinforced by most "literary fiction" have expanded the horizon of possibility for more venturesome writers.
Among those departures have been challenges to conventional "development" in fiction, signaled most immediately by a radical shortening of form, specifically in what is called "flash fiction" or "microfiction" but also in works ostensibly called novels that are much shorter than the traditional kind offered by big commercial publishers. Flash fiction, while it still potentially evokes the traditional elements of fiction--plot, setting, character--does so in a way that alters--or should alter--our perception of their purpose in a short story, but it also brings a renewed attention to style, to the writer's arrangement of language, sometimes to the point that a microfiction starts to closely resemble a prose poem. Shorter works (fewer than, say, 50 pages, which would preclude calling it even a novella) that seem structured not as short stories but with the more unhurried development of a novel perhaps also work to foreground language, but such works most obviously complicate assumptions about the formal requirements of novels.
Joshua Rothes' William Atlas (Osmanthus Press) takes the form of a picaresque fable of sorts, a would-be allegory that seems to deliberately frustrate its own pursuit of meaning. The titular character finds himself standing "in a shallow sea--in truth more of a hyper-expansive puddle" that extends "as far as he could see, an uncanny distance" and begins to walk, to a destination unknown except that at the end, he is certain, he will "return home" (wherever that might be). Although there are hints that this might be a journey of self-discovery--the first stage of the trip "taking him directly through himself," we are told--nothing much that happens in William Atlas's effort in "getting from point A to point B" seems to bring much in the way of enlightenment or illumination. There are ominous but elliptical references to "bodies" in his path, but whose they are or why they might be there remain mysterious. William comes upon a hill, ascends it, then descends it to a body of water below. He builds a boat, which then dissolves, as does the narrative itself does when William Atlas again finds himself moving in the muck.
Near the conclusion, the story's narrator makes explicit an analogy that has perhaps been implicit throughout: "William Atlas walks as the writer who commits to her mistakes, who undermines plot with chance meanders that, like the folds of a river, are contingent and changeable, and, to the outside observer, could be absolutely no other way, each oxbow just so." Such a writer is actually "among the more accurate, eschewing arcs for perturbations and eddies." This passage reinforces the metafictional gestures made elsewhere in William Atlas, particularly in relation to descriptions of the environment through which William Atlas traverses, as the narrator discusses the role of the "ecological novelist," thus raising the possibility that the book is a metaphorical rendering of the writer's plight, "trapped in a sub-optimal loop for our stubbornness in recognizing our own limitations."
If we do take the story to be (in part) an allegory of novel writing, it thus seems appropriate that the narrative itself is less than novel-length, even as it evokes the novel as a "system" of representation--the story of William Atlas's journey would threaten to become merely diffuse if extended much longer, considering its ending's implication that the journey indefinitely continues. Still, the story has ambitions beyond the metafictional, often manifested directly in allusions to other writers (Valery, Umberto Eco) or discursive asides (on the nature of myth, for example). William Atlas's experience climbing hills and trudging through the muck is strongly suggestive of Beckett in its depiction of elemental human circumstances, even as it is related in a discursive mode reminiscent of John Barth. The amalgamation never quite transcends its derivation from each of these previous writers, although William Atlas is certainly not an ordinary work of literary fiction.
Christopher Linforth's Directory (Otis Books) is perhaps at first glance a more conventional work, at least in that the form it takes, a collection of stories meant to cohere as a whole, is recognizable enough. Even as a gathering of connected flash fictions it is not unfamiliar, although the connections are through echo, variation, and point of view rather than more direct continuities of character or setting. Loosely similar situations recur, with subtly shifting characters and events, all of them narrated in the first-person plural point view--usually from the perspective of a set of twins or triplicates who relate their often troubled experiences (especially as children, when they are at times on the tormentor's end of bullying behavior, likely the consequence of trauma.)
This extended experiment with the first-person plural is both the most impressive achievement of Directory and its central unifying device (that it succeeds so well at the latter being no small part of its achievement). While the "we" narrator is a kind of unifying character that in a sense acts as the protagonist not just of the individual characters but of the book as a whole, this plural narrator is not strictly speaking a character at all but a literally disembodied voice whose blunt recitations of anecdote-sized exploits animate the stories:
Our misdeeds--let's start with those. We made our old man piss his pants. He limped away, sopped the urine with a kitchen rag and kept his hand over his crotch. He swore at us, said we were no good since our mother left. We laughed. We didn't care. We filched his bottom-shelf vodka and terrorized the neighborhood, rode our dirt bikes up and down the road, burning rubber outside of Mrs. Macomber's house. She watched us from her bedroom window. Her flash of silvery hair a clear sign we had her spooked. . . .
Much of the first half of the book is comprised of episodes like this, relating less than admirable behavior by a trio (in some cases duo) of young boys who are also clearly from unstable families. Thus while the point of view provides a formal (if unorthodox) unity throughout the book, the identity of the narrator(s) fluctuates, as do the particulars of each vignette. Some of them are narratives, but some are more impalpable memories, others more like mini-sagas compressed into 500-word recaps, some indeed approaching prose poetry in their lyricism, such as "Belief," a reverie-like story which begins, "On the day we flee town, we will want the neighborhood to know what happened. We will tell stories about our stepfather to the kind and not-so-kind men on our street, to the cops who size us up to see if we are underage, turning tricks, will turn a trick with them." Escape must remain in the future, but the story concludes with the assurance, "Any day now we will shout."
The second half of Directory contains more thematically varied stories that take exclusive focus away from the narrator, such as "The Temple," chronicling the arrival of a "pastor" who converts a tenement building into a mysterious temple, into which people enter but don't necessarily come back out. Panhandlers go inside but leave "with expressions of fear." "Zia" and "Showtime" are about the "we" narrator's sister, although the brothers lurk at the edges, their adolescent curiosity aroused by her near-exotic appeal. "Layover" focuses on "our shared wife" during a layover in an airport caused by ash from a volcanic eruption, into which the wife disappears at the story's conclusion. If the stories in the first half of the book create a disturbing but essentially realistic version of family dysfunction and adolescent defiance, the second half takes the exercise in first-person plural narration into different kinds of situations, more fanciful and extreme, extending into the narrator's later years. By the book's end, it is more explicitly suggested that this narrator may be a single individual after all, the various episodes perhaps representing multiple embellished iterations of this individual's life.
Although to say that Directory has the unity and focus of a novel would not be entirely misleading, to call it a "novel in stories" would really erase what is distinctive about the book, its use of the story-fragment to both exploit brevity as a self-sufficient narrative strategy and to organize a series of such brief stories so that the result is a work that has structural coherence without strictly conforming to a pre-established form--something independent of both story and novel. Perhaps we could say as well that Rothes in William Atlas has also created a work of fiction with the characteristics of both short story and novel that doesn't comfortably belong in either category. Of the two, Directory seems the work whose departures from the norm most readily suggest future possibilities for writers who might further explore its hybrid form, but certainly neither of these are books one could imagine appearing on the seasonal lists from the risk-averse publishing houses of the mainstream "book business."