The Cardboard Universe
The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank
Author: Christopher Miller
Multi-layered, complex, self-referential, meta-fiction. Very innovative although I have a sense that I am missing many of the in-jokes. The basics:
* Miller's book is a biography of Phoebus K. Dank as written by William Boswell and Owen Hirt. So, right off the bat, we have a book within a book, a reference to biography in general (Boswell's famous biography of Johnson), and a reference to Philip K. Dick.
* The book is a alphabetical reference guide to Dank's writing. So this is now operating on two levels. On the Miller level, the reader is expected to read this as a novel - from start to finish. On the Boswell/Hirt level, we have a reference guide to be browsed at leisure.
* Many of the stories in the book are themselves self-referential and connected. But I believe this is essential to untangling the plot. In specific, one of the stories is about a pair of identical twins who choose to live one life, and then another is about one person who lives two lives. And then at the end of the book, we start to realize that Boswell has killed Hirt, but has continued to live his life.
* So now we realize that our two co-authors who have been portrayed as hating each other and disagreeing on everything are actually one person. And it is not Hirt who has killed our subject Dank, but rather Boswell.
* And the reason for the murder was that Dank has begun to suspect that he is not real, that he may just be a character in a novel and furthermore Dank may not be quite the author that Boswell needs him to be (as the status of a biographer is highly dependent on the status of the subject).
And that is just the basics! The novel is actually quite funny in times - but it does seem to bog down at times. I was thinking that it could have been shorter - but on the other hand, I think it takes that long to truly develop the eventual plot twists. (I was probably missing a number of clues along the way).
Recommended: Serious fiction fans and those who like innovative, self-referential novels.