Thirteen years in the making, theMystery.doc is a 1,700-page shape-shifting novel that is unlike any book that has ever been published before. Mixing image, textual art, and interlacing plot lines, it transcends the limits of genre and form to create a highly inventive, often hilarious, and deeply moving work, which brilliantly reflects the times in which we live and the ways in which we consume and are consumed by information in the digital age.
Rooted in the western United States in the decade post-9/11, the book follows a young writer and his wife as he attempts to write his second book, a national epic he hopes will endure forever, and as he searches for a form that will express the world as it has become, revealing the interconnectedness of all our lives. Pop-up ads, internet search results, spam, lines of code, and film and television stills mix with canonical works of literature, alchemical manuscripts, transcripts of personal conversations, and the story of a man who wakes up one morning not knowing who he is, a blank document called themystery.doc newly appeared on his computer. Part love story, part prose poem, part documentary, part existential whodunit, part future-fiction, part bildungsroman, part memoir, theMystery.doc is about the quest to find something lasting in a world where everything is in danger of slipping away. Love, loss, birth, death, technology, terrorism, and the American Dream come together to form a great symphonic work that dazzles in both its structure and in its deep emotional resonance.