Text messaging a new Big Brother

EARLY last year, the online magazine Slate.com commissioned a novel from prolific and protean Walter Kirn, the author of “Thumbsucker,” “She Needed Me” and other fiction titles and already a contributor to Slate’s “pages.” The result was “The Unbinding,” three months’ worth of serial intrigue sprinkled with pithy takes on contemporary anomie that proved a hit with Slate’s hip, discerning readership. Now the entire concise text of Kirn’s “Internet novel” has been speedily reincarnated in 160-odd tangible paper pages, available in three-dimensional stores near you, nationwide.

Read all in one gulp, however, shorn of any week-to-week hope for resolution and enlightenment, “The Unbinding” takes the tension of reader confusion about as far as it can go before dissolving in frustration. But here’s a hint: The first rule of this spy-vs.-spy adventure is that no one is who he seems or claims to be. Corollary rule: No one manages to be who he really wants to be, either. As the protagonist, Kent, who is perhaps (but see above, probably not) merely a suburban, single, truck-driving, babe-ogling loserissimo surviving on pizza and rented movies, exclaims, “Undercover men -- what slaves they are! They’re slaves to their superiors, who abuse and oppress them because they’re slaves themselves. They’re slaves to their disguises, which force them to wear the suit of mediocrity. Mostly, though, they’re slaves to their suspicions, which belong not to them but to those who raise suspicion.”

For all the suspense engendered by “the scheming shapeshifters in “The Unbinding,” there isn’t a whole lot of story. Events, as recounted naturally mostly via the Internet by the main characters, are sparse. Kent apparently falls for Sabrina, a virgin “facialist” from his apartment complex. Characters are kidnapped and counter-kidnapped and then counter-counter-kidnapped. Sabrina for no discernible reason devotes herself to a scabrous, bedridden former Marine colonel who raves about an imminent day of reckoning he calls “the Unbinding.”

Meanwhile, Kent, who after errant druggy years has found his calling working for AidSat, a company that provides in-your-earbud personal angel service for all life’s little and big crises, runs into suave Rob, who seems to be a fellow renter and gym-rat. Rob soon is bedding Kent’s sexy ex and messaging his Pentagon connections while on a secret mission to save “America” -- whatever that means -- from the evil he suspects is embodied in Kent.

So far, so good. But the retained self-label of “Internet novel” raises an obvious question: In what way is, or was, this novel different from the pack on the display table? It’s not the real-time aspect of serialization -- Dickens had that back in the mid 1800s and, like Kirn, reveled in the chance to haul in current events by the short hairs. It might have been, but isn’t, a game of open, bifurcating endings. It might have been, but isn’t, wikipediaishly communal and interactive. What it is, though, is lavishly cross-referential.

Every chapter broadcasts bold-type words and phrases, links pursuable on the book’s Web version. An exchange with writer Amy Hempel apparently migrated in from personal correspondence. Most other links, from the Neil Diamond clip to a revolting segment on headworm removal, do not enrich the story. But they do considerably lengthen the reading experience.

Does anyone out there remember Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy cartoons? (Maybe an intrepid 12-year-old surferette, researching pre-Manga history?) The Black spy versus the White spy, mirror images of each other locked in eternal opposition, would make appropriate cover art for Kirn’s novel. Clearly, even when staring cross-eyed at peas in a pod we humans itch to assign Good Guy and Bad Guy labels; it’s etched in our genes, fuels wars and custody battles as well as secret societies and conspiracies -- not to mention paranoid conspiracy delusions. To keep reshuffling the deck of clues on which character to call Good and which one Bad sets one of the sharpest, surest hooks in fiction. Kirn’s wackily “average” mutual stalkers are neither very likeable nor very credible -- that’s not the point. But they are compelling -- as long as they are unexplained.

What is the point, then? Kirn’s thumbprints, in the form of tropes familiar from previous novels, are all over this story. Runaway boys, dumb women, messianic sects. “The Unbinding” is stuffed with references to undercover zealotry, including our Founding Fathers and a persistent California-based, dog-worshiping Satanist sect. As Rob laments to Kent, “Is there something about computer land that drives its denizens to bogus sorcery? Why does the consummate product of rationality foster this dragon haunted spiritualism?” Well said, Walter. Which side are you on?

During its on-line lifespan “The Unbinding” was mostly blog-hailed as a warning and allegory, a sort of “Pilgrim’s Progress” about the incursions of government and kudzu-vine technology into “private space,” to resurrect a phrase. Certainly Kirn lends his smart, sarcastic voice to this current Greek chorus. But the novel goes further, tapping toward a vision of life where “personal identity” has long since lost meaning. Although one can’t ask everything of a novel hammered out on deadline, it’s a good bet the keen-witted and funny Walter Kirn will continue exploration of this territory: ages old but new again to us, today.

Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground” and “Out After Dark” and the story collection “Belong to Me.”