(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

It's funny that I should read James Greer's The Failure, the latest by the always great Akashic Books, the same week I saw Steven Soderbergh's "lost" 1999 classic The Limey, because they turn out to be eerily similar in both concept and tone; namely, they are both at their hearts fairly standard noir tales, but elevated into the realm of fine art by taking a daring approach towards telling their stories. In the case of The Failure, for example, our noirish plot revolves around a smartypants loser in Los Angeles poetically named Guy Forget, who you can imagine as what would happen if some philosophy grad student started watching too many Tarantino-style indie films, and convinced himself that nerdy intellectuals can also somehow be at the center of gritty tough-guy crime tales; the storyline itself, then, hinges on the plan concocted by him and his harebrained friend Billy to hold up a Korean check-cashing place with the help of an inside employee, so that Guy can build the prototype for his insane Web 2.0 project that he thinks is going to make him a billionaire, all of which as you can easily guess goes straight to hell as the book continues, just as any good noir should.

But like I said, it's how Greer tells this story that makes the manuscript stand out, hopping from one non-linear moment to the next in almost random fashion, jumping for example from a conversation between Guy and his self-destructive girlfriend a week before the robbery, to a deadpan comedic conversation between Guy and Billy ten minutes after the botched robbery about what went wrong, straight to a bar talk three months previously when the plan was first being formulated. This effectively lets The Failure succeed at the same thing that the old hyperfiction online projects of the 1990s were attempting to do as well, to tell their stories to their audiences in a way much more similar to how humans actually learn stories in the real world, in bits and pieces and without a nice narrative structure to it all; and in fact, this book would make for a great interactive online project if the author ever wanted to try such a thing, to put each chapter on its own webpage and with references within the text made into hyperlinks to other chapters, so that audience members themselves determine the order of the book, an order that changes with each person and with each reading*. Greer already wrote this book in a way so that the story can be presented in this fashion; and although it's nothing spectacular when it comes to its actual plot or dialogue, it's worth checking out just for the inventive structure alone.

Out of 10: 8.4

*By the way, this hyperlink style of storytelling is now possible on e-ink devices like the iPad and Sony Reader, in that EPUB files for these devices are essentially nothing more than HTML documents, only rendered in a different way than how web browsers do it. I would love to put out a project like this through CCLaP's publishing wing; those who have a good idea for such a hyperfiction project are encouraged to drop a line and let me know. Why yes, this is essentially the same thing as the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" children's books from the '80s and '90s; those are in fact the most famous examples of hyperfiction we have. ( )