Walter Kirn’s online novel ‘The Unbinding’

Kinda like how when you own a red car, it seems like all the cars on the road are read, it seems, too, that when you plan to write a novel and publish it online in serial form as a work in progress, it seems like everyone’s doing it. Kirn’s new novel, called The Unbinding, which he’s writing on the fly, debuted in March on Slate, with twice weekly postings continuing through June. I’ve just read the first few chapters, and I’m... intrigued. It’s too early to say whether I’m hooked, but I’ll read some more of the chapters already posted and see where it takes me.

Kirn’s editor at Slate, Meghan O’Rourke, explains:

While novels have been serialized in mainstream online publications before, this is the first time a prominent novelist has published a genuine Net Novel—one that takes advantage of, and draws inspiration from, the capacities of the Internet. The Unbinding, a dark comedy set in the near future, is a compilation of "found documents"—online diary entries, e-mails, surveillance reports, etc. It will make use of the Internet's unique capacity to respond to events as they happen, linking to documents and other Web sites. In other words, The Unbinding is conceived for the Web, rather than adapted to it.

Okay, that sounds cool, but as Alex Lencicki at Brokentype points out, from both a technical standpoint as well as a narrative one, The Unbinding leaves quite a bit to be desired:

[T]he site is a disaster. Somehow Slate has managed to excise all of the design techniques that actually make serial novels practical and fun to read online.

...

To get to the current chapter of The Unbinding you have to scan through Slate's home page to find the link, then click it to go to a pointless launch page, then install flash if you don’t have it (so long readers, hello Cylon!), then click to pop-up the site, and then click the latest chapter on the left column. (whew) And if you want to print the page you’ll have to scroll all the way to the bottom and download a PDF file since the frame prevents you from printing normally.

This is not reading, this is work. It's like having a book that you have to tap and flip over six times before you can to read a chapter.

...

There’s a basic rule to a serial novel, which is that nearly every chapter should end with a cliffhanger. This isn’t always appropriate for literary fiction, but not all fiction is appropriate for serialization....

This shouldn’t really be a mystery to writers – it’s the same technique 24, and Lost, and the Sopranos use week after week. (O.M.F.G they shot him!) Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, Steven King, all wrote serials. If the book doesn't at least follow some of the plotting techniques they use, it's not going to work.

And Alex should know: he’s currently in the middle of publishing the serial novel Thirteen Bullets, by Dave Wellington, his third Wellington serial. (I’ll be sure to heed lots of Alex’s advice for online serials when I start publishing mine.)

There’s quite a bit of hi-falutin’ literary handwringing over The Unbinding, too, like this almost incomprehensible fretting from Sven Birkets in the Boston Globe:

What Kirn seems to be after-like Kerouac in his ethos of unfiltered expression (though he did not always follow it) or William Burroughs with his cut-up novels or the participatory theater experiments of the '60s-is the reverse. He wants to use the medium as a way of breaking what dramatists call the ''fourth wall"-the illusion of a separate, freestanding order on the other side of the proscenium arch-merging the digital world-in-progress with the digital work-in-progress.

This is no small thing-indeed, I don't know that it can be done. More important, I don't know if we finally want it to be done. Artistic distance may well be prophylactic, a requirement for sanity in the face of the boggling complexity of living. As Nietzsche put it: ''We have art that we not perish of the truth."

Of course fiction cannot sequester itself exclusively in its orderly invented worlds. Narrative art must continue to map and process the world, and now that the world has become-significantly-tuned to the constant pulsations of information, now that reality is gaining at the level of data as it sacrifices material definition, we look to novels to key us in. Whether active incorporation of the Internet is a new next step-whether it can take us anywhere beyond the thrills of techno-paranoia-remains to be seen.

And yet, if Kirn can successfully deploy some of the energies and capabilities of this extraordinary technology, if he can intensify the participatory dynamic of reading-real-time interaction with real-time output-and win a readership, others will quickly follow. Should this happen, the best-case scenario might be the emergence of works that alert us to-and make us question-the significance of the process that has made them possible.

And that’s only a tiny part of what Birkets has to say.

Me, I’m not too worried about ethoses or prophylactic artistic distances -- I just want to tell an entertaining story that, if it happens to be little thought-provoking too, then fine. Lencicki has it right when he likens serial fiction to television (though of course the more apt analogy would be to liken TV to serial fiction) -- and it’s how I’ve been framing the story I’m working on in my head, as not-quite-freestanding episodes in a larger tale, and developing an interesting setting and intriguing characters and then setting them loose to see what they do.

That’s when serial fiction works as entertainment even if it fails to achieve the rarefied level of High Art: if it introduces us to people and places we like spending time with and in. It remains to be seen whether Kirn can do that with The Unbinding, but I’m not tuning out yet.