Whether or not readers in fact find Andrew Farkas's Big Red Herring (Kernpunkt Press) to be entertaining, there would seem to be little question that it is a novel intended to entertain. Its plot, if such a pastiche of the very concept of pastiche could be said to have one, is so blatantly silly, so undisguised in its celebration of artifice and contrivance, that we know it is all an invitation to the reader to enjoy the silliness and to take the usual narrative machinery of fiction altogether less seriously (at least this once). Moreover, the contrivances are so shamelessly deployed, so extravagant, that the novel's very excess provokes a kind of fascination in itself.
And indeed this novel is entertaining enough--at least at first. At its core is a radio drama called Vayss Uf Makink You Tock, concerning a hapless protagonist called Wall, who is menaced by the Gestapo (hence the title of the play), except that the play takes place in the present of an alternate history. The U.S. and the Soviet Union, which still exists, actually collaborated during the ostensible Cold War to in fact keep the world safe. The Nazis, it would appear, survived World War II (what we call World War II) by developing a rocket ship that transported a contingent of them to the moon, which they have colonized. The Gestapo agents have come to earth to discover who has leaked news of their existence, and Wall has come under suspicion.
Almost immediately it becomes clear that this narrative is mostly nonsensical, so that keeping track of the various intrigues, counterfactuals, and plot twists (Vayss Uf Makink You Tock is only a part of the novel's overall narrative structure) hardly seems essential. And there are many such entanglements: a parallel murder mystery that develops due to the fact that a dead body just happens to be under Wall's sofa, a radio within the radio play that narrates the alternate history by which World War II was really just a show while the Americans and the Russians set about faking the Cold War and the Nazis conquered space, an extended treatise on the physics of the knuckleball, a panel of experts who help us understand the literary and historical particulars of the story we are reading, and much more. The primary subplot actually concerns the narrator of the radio drama, Edward R. Murrow (a stage name of sorts for a character whose job is to narrate, not the historical journalist Murrow), who is appalled by the script he must voice and struggles to avoid changing it, which is forbidden. The novel uses Murrow to raise questions about storytelling conventions, but it does so in such an outrageously explicit way that the usual complaints about the "game-playing" of metafiction surely seem pointless. The whole novel is quite obviously a game.
But this is also surely the chief limitation of a novel like Big Red Herring. In treating the customary goals of metafiction--to remind readers of the artificiality of all the structural devices of fiction, particularly those that seem most familiar, most "natural"--as the subject of farce, the artifice is assuredly on display (perhaps even more conspicuously than in most works of metafiction), but that very artificiality essentially itself becomes the center of interest, as the very broad comedy makes it less likely that many readers would find reason to see in it anything other than a kind of benign mockery. The Gestapo dialogue--“Ve are establishink Ihr Hintergrund. Your background. For instance, how lonk haff you liffed here?”--and the deliberately hare-brained absurdity of the "alternate history" premise makes it additionally difficult to take the various goings-on any more seriously than does Edward R. Murrow. That they are intermittently funny, which poor Edward R. himself doesn't have the luxury to see, doesn't seem a sufficient reward for indulging some of them.
Nevertheless, it is always laudable that a writer is willing to take risks, and it is encouraging that there are presses like Kernpunkt willing to publish a work like Big Red Herring, a novel that surely both writer and publisher knew full well would not likely find a big audience. Its "entertainment" value is finally too dependent on readers already disposed to appreciate jokes about literary theory (an "ambiguity expert" named Polly Semmy, a drug called Narratol that helps its user "construct a coherent narrative out of his or her life"), readers who are familiar by now with the assumptions of metafiction. Even for these readers, however, the jokes may not be enough to sustain a novel of 460 pages.
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