Same Same

October 22, 2018
In Mendelsund’s comically disturbing debut, writer Percy Frobisher, a brilliant thinker but an unreliable narrator, travels to a technologically advanced, unnamed institute in the desert to complete a project, the specifics of which are unclear even to him. Percy flounders in his work, instead focusing his energy on observing the institute’s other fellows (including Miss Chatterton the Mysterious Woman, The-Man-Who-Assiduously-Tracks-His-Own-Life-Data, and a woman whose name consists of a smiley-face character), dodging the administrators attempting to keep him on task, going on benders, and sneaking into town to the mysterious Same Same shop, which seems to be able to perfectly replicate any item. As a constant, bizarre storm of paper sends pages flying everywhere and the utopian facade of the institute begins to crack, Percy sets out to test the limits of the Same Same technology and of his own creative practice. Slow to start, occasionally self-indulgent, but ultimately rewarding, this novel is absurdist, uncanny metafiction about the nature of identity, individuality, and authorship in an era of rapid technological advancement. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, Gernert Co.

November 15, 2018
"What the project is, only the project knows." So we learn as this enigmatic tale, Mendelsund's (What We See When We Read, 2014) debut novel, winds its way to a close.Percy Frobisher might have done well to turn around when, on arriving at the desert retreat known as the Institute, he is greeted with the words, "Welcome to nowhere." It's a nowhere in which, though he does not then know it, he will spend years, a nowhere with plenty of dystopia to it. He prefers not to talk about the project that has brought him there even if, as his greeter cajoles, it's the purpose of the Institute for people to talk about what they're up to. Indeed, Percy doesn't quite know what that project is: a novel, at times, or a Gysin-esque collage, or a set of drawings so precise as to include the world to scale, as in the Borges fable. "I see now that, whereas the design of the project is strong, so much depends on how it is realized," he tells himself. Percy soon learns, however, that the Institute is an odd place, part factory of dreams, part boot camp to wrestle the elusive artistic temperament into a manageable and measurable thing; says its director, creativity "is more or less a technology" that requires nothing less than total commitment, helped along by a program that mixes therapy with coaching and self-criticism, to say nothing of technological oddities that threaten to turn the whole place and everything in it into--well, call it the simulacrum of a simulacrum. Mendelsund, by day an art director and book-cover designer at Knopf, has a grand time serving up what would seem to be an extended metaphor for creativity, complete with some useful if sometimes strange pointers ("Though the project shall bootstrap its very existence out of its mere possibility, the project shall also be self-liquidating") that would do Brian Eno proud.Mendelsund's novel of ideas makes a neat bookend to Richard Powers's Galatea 2.2 as a study of creation in the age of the smart machine.

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February 1, 2019
Mendelsund's (What We See When We Read, 2014) debut novel follows Percy Frobisher, a resident at a highly managed, hypermodern artists' retreat in a Middle Eastern desert, where he is surrounded by other creatives intent on using the institute to complete their work, the results of which are triumphantly presented in a manner reminiscent of TED talks. But Percy keeps getting distracted from his undefined project, and when he discovers an otherworldly, magical-realist shop in a nearby town where one can recreate any object perfectly with the command same same, he becomes transfixed. Like an ever-shifting Rubik's Cube, Mendelsund's narrative blends influences and genres at will: it begins as an sf dystopia, unfurls like a mystery, and includes some deeply insular sections reminiscent of the late David Markson. Using a setting and themes similar to Don DeLillo's Zero K (2016), Mendelsund has created a dense, complex, and rewarding novel that explores the ever-hazier distinctions between copying and creating, between ourselves and our ubiquitous devices, and between what is real and what is simulated.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)