Seam(/)ess

SEAMLESS is the postmodern novella you’ve been waiting for. Assuming that you’ve been waiting for a postmodern novella. One of the characters has a superhip catch-phrase: “Ice yourself, bro!” I’m just putting that out there.

This book has everything. Academic satire. Loosely veiled attacks on the literary establishment. Post-structural puns. Punctuation, chapter titles. Awkward masturbation scenes [as opposed to those majestic masturbation scenes you’ve heard so much about]. Depressing/ hilarious portraits of failed scholars. It’s funny, weird, elegantly-prosed, stylish [like a SteveJobs mock-turtleneck paired with taffeta culottes], poignant and folds into a small coffee table. Witness the excoriation of dunderheaded academics! Cringe at uncomfortable sex scenes! Belly-laugh at astute references to Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet, even if you can’t pronounce their names!

SEAMLESS is a commentary on genre, poetics and criticism. That sounds pretentious, but still. SEAMLESS is like Dom DeLillo, if he didn’t write nearly as well and had a sloppy editor. Like Martin Amiss without the pedophilia. Like Paul Austere, but not so disembodied, and with stuff...happening.

Ever read a postmodern colossus all the way thru? I’m talking Giles Goat-Boy, The Recognitions, Infinite Jest. And I don’t mean you just carried it around for a few months to attract a cute, alterna-bespectacled pixie who (thinks she) looks like Zooey Deschanel. Didn’t think so. Ever wish these masterpieces were shorter, not written in Elizabethan English, had fewer than 200 pages of footnotes, did not make “wry” jokes in Danish, and were enjoyable? Do we really need a “brief history” of the main character’s grandmother’s wet nurse’s bunion infestation?

SEAMLESS has reduced the postmodern magnum opus to a, I won’t say bulimic, but a rather svelte volume. How did “the author” do it? Did he starve plot? Put character development on a low-carb diet? Trick reader enjoyment into eating a box of Ex-lax, in order to, well, you know? No, he just had all the boring parts lipo-suctioned out. SEAMLESS has all the humor, pathos and “impressive”© verbal acrobatics of, say, The Stipulations (by Franz Janzen), but without the long-winded prose, pretentious show-offy bits, unnecessary detours and talking poo.

Here’s what people are saying:

Franz Janzen [author of THE STIPULATIONS]: “This is certainly [...] the greatest book ever written. I [...] love it.”

Sikki Nixx [Motley Apercu bassist, Satan’s footsoldier, author of THE HERON DIARIES]: “This book is written...using...words. Kinda like our songs, only different. We probably couldn’t write this well, except for most of the stuff on Girls Girls Girls.”

Winfry Harpo [Queen of American Belles Lettres]: “I have literally heard of this book. And that is so totally amazing.”

Kingsley Stevens [Billionaire, horror magnate, “the Comptroller of Creepy”]: “Madigan has scary talent. If you know what I... Oh, you do know what I mean? Sorry, okay.”

All too often, postmodern fiction is a depleted form. Lifeless, inert. Just a bleached carcass of abstraction. Novels about the writing of novels. With no real plot. Doing nothing but looking up their own b-holes. Literally. Not SEAMLESS. This is a clever, thoughtful, deeply human story, with intricate plotting, and several exciting [-ish] plot twists. It mocks, belittles and spits upon all the hackneyed, trite, dull, fancy-pants pomo flim-flam. It’s post-postmodernism for the post-postliterate generation.