microreview: Steven Hall’s “The Raw Shark Texts”

I came to Steven Hall’s 2007 novel The Raw Shark Texts by way of a Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and while the books share a few conceptual similarities, I enjoyed Hall’s novel quite a bit more. It upheld a personal tenant that Danielewski’s novel broke: that a novel, above all else, should be fun. And fun is of course a subjective thing–a friend of mine had a ton of fun with House of Leave, annotating it obsessively. But after 600 pages, I was done.

The Raw Shark Texts is narrated by Eric Sanderson, who wakes up on the first page in a home he doesn’t recognize, with no memory of who he is, where he is, what’s he’s done. Through notes left to him by “The First Eric Sanderson,” he finds his way to Dr. Randle, a psychiatrist, who informs Eric that he has a rare psychological disorder that causes him to lose his memories in unpredictable, untreatable waves. She tells that this is the eleventh time that he’s woken up and come to her.

Eric is also being hunted. Hunted by a purely conceptual shark called a Ludovician, an enormous conceptual fish that eats memory. Eric must attempt to hide himself from the shark, which swims in the streams of communication between human beings, by surrounding himself with a constant white-noise of nonsense, hiding important items in boxes full of mail, all the while attempting to decode the cryptic and arcane correspondence left to him by his alleged former self. It’s a totally bizarre and out-there concept, and it’s awesome. The novel deals with a complex network of themes–from the fabric of memory, to loss, to the very nature of language and narrative and it’s effect on human life. It’s intelligent without being obtuse, and dense without being impenetrable, and the narrative is told with such authority, wit and confidence that I was always anxious to continue.

I’ll read whatever Hall comes out with next.