Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

 

Just over three hundred pages of a novelist realizing his story contained several stories, or that his several stories were all the same. Written as though "fragmented" and "kaleidoscopic" are the same thing, with characters who are all dragged through the events of their stories by the actions of others, with no climax and bloody little resolution. Shocking how the "brilliant" literary fiction of fifteen years ago completely fails to hold up--almost as though "literary" were just a lie, not even a genre like all the others.