Icelander

I just finished Dustin Long’s book Icelander a few nights ago, and it’s still on my mind. I’m ready to say that this is actually the best novel I’ve read since Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, oh, several summers ago. Don’t think that comparison was just drawn from the blue, either: Mr. Long isn’t shy about admitting the Pynchonian and Nabokovian influences that suffuse his work alongside the more evident nods to the great detective writers. Yes, this is a novel with a Philip Leshio and a Constance Lingus (stop, think). This is a novel one of whose main characters is a "rogue library scientist." This is a novel built on a fictional series of memoirs which are occasionally referenced in the footnotes of a mysterious editor who on one occasion jabs the fictitious author of the fictitious memoirs for employing the far-fetched conceit of basing one of his own novels on imaginary source material and a fictitious editor.

Oh yes, this is a novel with footnotes.

But it’s not like you might imagine! Never once did reading Icelander feel like slogging through Infinite Jest; never once did the writing feel affected or precious. In fact, it was more engaging than a  lot of the more straightforward fiction I’ve made time for  already this  summer. There’s a swordfight! There are Icelandic ninjas! At the heart of it all, there’s even a murder mystery! Icelander knows how to balance the literate with the pulpy, and it works so well precisely because of this balance.

If the book sounds good, I’m afraid you’re too late to catch it on sale at McSweeney’s, as I did. But I’ll forgo my usual Amazon affiliate link to link to McSweeney’s online store again, because, sale or not, they could still use your business. And you could use a good book, right?