There’s time in this novel that I really liked what I was reading, and then the rug is pulled out from under me in a way that I felt frustrated and annoyed. I think that seems to be something of the point here, or at least a point here, a book that actively resists your own reading. What we are reading is a remix of the Snow White and the Seven Dwarves fairy tale but told through a completely decontextualized and deconstructed set of writing formats including interview, personal narrative, literary analysis essay, psychological novel, and other formats. It feels like an attempt to capture the broken up and fractured nature of 20th century discourse that includes, television, radio, film, academic discourse, psychology, and other forms of communication that does in fact make sense in individualized terms as we confront them, but in an attempt to put them all together in a single form and show them in terms of a cohesive narrative like we have in novels those disparate ways of conveying information and narrative don’t make sense together.
So what is the result of all this? A novel, such as it is, that is probably brilliant in a lot of ways and interesting as an object of study, but not something that I particularly enjoyed reading, certainly not in a kind of end of the year and finding ways to round out my end of year reading list and cull my shelves of books I gathered but never read, well, it’s not much fun to read.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Snow-White-Donald-Barthelme/dp/0684824795/ref=sr_1_1?crid=VTIJNO014WIA&keywords=snow+white+donald+barthelme&qid=1577286083&sprefix=snow+white+don%2Caps%2C138&sr=8-1)