The Disjointed State of the Literary World

A couple of weeks ago, one of my best friends suffered a heart attack. But the way I heard about it was seriously disjointed. To begin with, it occurred during a hockey game that I wasn’t attending. So right off the bat  I was already in a position where I wasn’t really in the loop. Then I started getting the phone calls. People who also weren’t at the game trying to get an understanding of what was going on. It was weird talking to five different people that night who in actuality knew a lot more than I did. In fact each conversation told me something knew. It happened during the game, he’s already at the hospital, he’s in a medically induced coma, etc. It was kind of like the post modern story we’re reading now. The story was fragmented, and definitely not chronological. It seemed hectic, and filled with emotion. I mean this was a person who has been my neighbor for 14 years. I’ve slept over at his house, him at mine, and we’ve just hung out more times than I can count. It was like I didn’t know what to feel because I didn’t know what was happening.

Without that sense of cohesiveness I felt almost lost. Which is actually how I felt about “A Visit From the Goon Squad” for a while. It was so disjointed it was hard to follow. But I feel like I’m getting better at it. As Ms. Young has said, today’s stories are increasingly adopting this kind of style. In order to keep up with today’s literary world, you need to get used to disjointed. It doesn’t seem to be going away.