theMystery.doc
by Matthew McIntosh
(Grove Atlantic, 2017)
In 1940, the town of Kettle Falls was submerged deep below the surface of the Columbia River. The completion of Grand Coulee Dam raised the waters by 380 feet and necessitated relocation of the entire town. Today the community in Washington’s Northeast corner is known mostly for its ghost twin. The specter of Kettle Falls plays significantly in Matthew McIntosh’s theMystery.doc, both as a key setting and as a kind of Northwestern Atlantis, as ever-present as the narrator “Matt McIntosh” and his alter ego Daniel navigate their own murky depths.
TheMystery.doc is not an easy book. At 1,660 pages, even hauling it around is a challenge. The fragmented narrative jumps between elements as seemingly unconnected as September 11 transcripts, phone conversations with AI bots, and page after page of colons and asterisks that form a code that is never explained. But for the patient and adventurous reader it is worth the effort. Its artful typesetting and assemblage of photos and movie frames is indebted to predecessors including Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Night Film by Marisha Pessl, but McIntosh’s book is a unique creation that should inspire more than a few writers to explore new methods of storytelling.
Like Sharma Shields and Jess Walter, McIntosh is at his best capturing Cascadian life outside the tech bubble. His successful 2003 debut, Well, offered bleak, mostly unconnected connected tales of his hometown: Federal Way, Washington. TheMystery.doc travels the roads between Federal Way, Spokane, and Kettle Falls. McIntosh’s world is one of weird neighbors, disputes over pets, and drug dens just outside town.
Despite its heft and unconventional narrative, theMystery.doc is at its core a small, intimate story that seems to parallel the author’s own life. A central thread explores a writer’s decade-long struggle to follow up on a successful debut. His quest for literary greatness – or at the least a completion of a successful followup novel – is thwarted by humorous obstacles as well as very real tragedies. McIntosh explores the struggle with an affable self-awareness exemplified by Matt’s inability to answer the simple question about his book, “what’s it about?”
So, what is it about? Reader opinion will vary, and that’s both the intrigue and the challenge of theMystery.doc. Many of the book’s fragmentary stories– a fairy tale, a noir-ish story of amnesia, a chronicle of a comically unambitious criminal syndicate– are half-baked concepts, false starts toward whatever it is Matt is trying to write. More important is the reality that he’s trying to escape: a dying father, a crumbling marriage, a child’s health crisis.
The passages with the most impact come when Matt’s emotion breaches his detachment and he deals with his reality in fits and starts. The storytelling fractures as Matt’s life falls apart, and the stylistic elements, which could be justly dismissed as gimmickry, can also be interpreted as a somewhat literal expression of mental overload. As in Kettle Falls, the mysteries that matter are ultimately those of the real world, where real people are living and dying—not in fantastical tales beneath the surface.
Jim Pollock is a media professional who lives in Redmond, Washington. Follow him on Twitter at @Jim_W_Pollock
