A million windows

THE AUSTRALIAN NOVELIST Gerald Murnane has become known for works of difficult genius, and his latest will only burnish that reputation. An exploration of the mind and of literary creation, it is a book of intricate construction and vast intellectual scope. Moving between fiction, philosophy and literary theory, "A Million Windows" investigates and demonstrates the aesthetic of what Murnane calls "true fiction," which faithfully records the narrator's "invisible world" of the mind. This is distinct from artifice, where the writer consciously creates, and realism, where the reader is prompted to think of characters and places as actually existing. Rather, "true fiction" conceives of an invisible metaphysical plane that extends infinitely forward, backward, even sideways, into every possible temporal, topical and spatial dimension. In it are autonomous "fictional personages" (characters), whose existence the writer "learns of" rather than creates. A "considered narrator" selects and records a work from infinite possibilities. Every paragraph of the resulting text prompts endless possibilities in the reader's own mind and - if the reader happens to be another "true fiction" writer - infinite possibilities for his or her work. Got it? Good. Murnane presents this complex aesthetic in a text that performs the theory it advances. The organizing conceit is that a narrator is writing the book we are reading, located within "a house of two or, perhaps, three stories," peopled by fictional writers. The house is, allegorically, a piece of the invisible world, and the narrator is both a personage in and our guide to it. The book progresses through the narrator's lectures on narratology and "true fiction," his reports on the invisible world and discussions of the books the fictional authors are writing. These take place through layers of abstraction: a writer writing about a writer writing about a writer writing about writing, and so on. Nonlinear, with almost no character names or dialogue, the intermeshing narratives are organized instead by repeated images: a grassy landscape, a house of two or three stories, a sunlit window and versions of a dark-haired woman, whose tragedy forms the thread of a story. The recurrent imagery reflects Murnane's belief that his fiction comes from elements that reverberate - often across decades - in his invisible world, demanding to be pursued and investigated. Thus "A Million Windows" produces a convincing approximation of the mind's terrifying limitlessness. Murnane's prose embodies the book's complexities. While grammatically immaculate, his sometimes page-long sentences are studded with subordinate clauses, legalistic definitions and refusals to take concrete positions on terms: "The first-person narrator who was last mentioned early in the paragraph preceding the previous paragraph reported that an earlier version of himself, so to call him, had been so affected by his having read about the last survivor, so to call him, that he, the earlier version, had planned to write a work of fiction." The impolite description for Murnane's prose is that of a 19th-century judge; a kinder tactic would be to acknowledge a debt to Henry James. "A Million Windows" has left me in a quandary. I disagree, vehemently, with the narrator's dismissal of plot, realism and dialogue. I believe that entertainment and accessibility can be worthy goals for art, and often find Murnane's writing bloodless and willfully obscure. My copy of the novel is filled with foul-mouthed marginalia. But on second reading, I found myself marveling at Murnane's intellectual power and originality, acknowledging respect for an artist so devoted to the precise execution of a demanding aesthetic. "A Million Windows" will find keen readers at literary theory seminars - but that, I suspect, will be it. Murnane, however, doesn't write for a popular audience. So it shouldn't bother him a bit. JAMES MCNAMARA'S work has appeared in The Australian Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator and other publications. A narrator is writing the book we are reading, within a house peopled by fictional writers.

Acclaimed in Australia, Murnane is too little known in the States. His eleventh novel has postmodern trappings: unnamed characters and nearly no story, while the structure is intricate and the prose is precise, self-referential, allusive, essayistic, and abstract. Difficult to say what the subject of this beautiful and strange tale might be, but here's a clue: to understand how the so-called actual and the so-called possible what he did and what he only dreamed of doing come finally to be indistinguishable in the sort of text we call true fiction. He opposes Coleridge's platitude that fiction demands the willing suspension of disbelief, and draws his title from a remark by Henry James. Murnane argues that true fiction is more worthy of trust than what he calls the visible world, and that the discerning reader can and should accept as truth what takes place in the narrative dimension more than what she observes in life. This may sound preposterous, but the proof is in the reading of this astonishing feat by a writer of profound conviction.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2016 Booklist

Part memoir and part manifesto, Australian writer Murnane's series of fictional and essayistic experiments requires careful consideration and study. The premise of the book extends from the Henry James epigraph that opens it: "The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million." Murnane walks readers through several of his distinctive touchstones of writing, and he illustrates his arguments with multiple vignettes and fictional scenarios. Murnane is brooding and deeply serious about his subject matter. He ruminates on the effects of memory by writing variations of a story in which a man sees a young girl on a train. The encounter opens a door of possibility, and Murnane wants the reader to realize that this story could ultimately be written "in any of a million ways." He often writes in lengthy, spiraling sentences and is prone to making broad pronouncements such as "One of the many devices employed by writers of fiction is the use of the present tense." Murnane frequently contrasts the abilities of fiction with those of film-to the detriment of film. Murnane is a master of breathing life into fiction, and his compilation of ideas on the subject holds immense value because those ideas are often so idiosyncratic and contrarian. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.