Storytelling & Narratives with "Unrelated" Threads

[Megan]

So this is a thought I had today while talking with Russell, because I know that some have talked about the seemingly unrelated narrative threads at play here – Noah, Sarah, The System, Otis, iConfidant, Stacey, and now Marcus. And how on earth does it all tie together and make a nice, neat story?

For some reason this has not concerned me one bit and I realized that I think it’s because it mirrors some of the fiction I tend to read. David Mitchell is my absolute favorite writer, and this is basically 80% of what he does – the description of his first book “Ghostwritten” is “A gallery attendant at the Hermitage. A young jazz buff in Tokyo. A crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong. A disc jockey in Manhattan. A physicist in Ireland. A… bunch of other stuff. What is the common thread that connects blahblahblah…”

Mark Danielewski does this too, with “The Familiar,” which I haven’t started yet but sits on my shelves staring at me every night. And doesn’t it take over 1000 pages before he starts connecting his pieces? He wrote “House of Leaves.” We love him.

“Watchmen” does it too, to an extent, and that’s not even new.

There are a fuckton of others because this is a trend in modern (postmodern?) fiction (along with the nested parentheses (maybe Murakami does it though he’s different)) but those are the two I can think of right now. And if I’m getting things wrong then please forgive me I’m not a literature person. Anyway, point is, it could just be that Lust is telling a story in the same way that MANY writers of fiction are currently telling stories.

I think that when the pieces start to connect – which may or may not happen on Monday – it will range somewhere from satisfying to mindblowing.

Or I may just not like nice, neat stories.

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