Online Unbinding Bound to Paper

By Ron Hogan on February 23, 2007 8:04 AM

I’ll admit it: When Slate began serializing The Unbinding last year, I took a quick glance, then proceeded to let the boat sail out of the harbor without me. My loss; I wound up inhaling the entire novel in about three hours earlier this week after getting hold of the paperback, then spent another half hour at Walter Kirn‘s online keyword index, tracking down all the hyperlinks that are represented in the book by boldface type. I emailed Kirn (left) to ask if he was satisfied with the compromise he’d had to make in order to replicate the technological effect for a print-based format. “The process of having to click on a website that lists links included in the text is awkward, I’ll admit, but it’s the only way that I could come up with to approximate online hypertext.” But he’s not entirely focused on what’s “missing” in translating The Unbinding to print. “A paper book is just a container for a story, but it’s a better container, for the time being, than the internet,” he explains, “mostly because it communicates a lot about what to expect from the reading experience. A physical book, for example, tells you immediately just how long the story is and where you are in it—a quarter of the way through, halfway through, and so on. On the net you’re always in limbo about these facts, but a book conveys them instantly and silently.”

Then again, I could easily see how the right narrative would suck you in so effectively that limbo wouldn’t bother you, creating an immersive environment where the frustration would come only when readers come up against the wall, and there’s no more paths left to explore. Even from the jury-rigged version I was reading, I could tell that the online version of The Unbinding was meant to have some of those qualities. In addition to the chapters on Slate, for example, Kirn created a Gmail account for one of his main characters, published a few of the letters that came in, then gave the password to his audience so they could peek inside…a move that opened up the narrative to include another author, acclaimed short-story writer Amy Hempel. “Amy’s a friend and was reading The Unbinding as it appeared,” Kirn explained. “She offered suggestions about it occasionally and I was able to go to her with ideas and problems. At one point I asked if she’d pose as an ex-girlfriend of Kent Selkirk who has, years after their romance, spotted him online. Her assignment was to reminisce about their time together, but I didn’t stipulate what her tone or mood should be or even what sort of incidents she should recall.” For Kirn, it was the “real-time” nature of the book’s simultaneous writing and publication that made such tactics possible, all part of the open-endedness that led him to start writing with “no outline, no notes, nothing… only the notion that my subject should match my method… [and] the message of the book to play off the environment in which it would be consumed.”