I am suspicious of contemporary fiction. I will turn to the first page of a book, hoping to find a new world to fall into. I want to be enveloped into a world that appears to have evolved on its own, and grown by its own momentum. Instead I find a watch, constructed by a watchmaker who has tried hard not to make himself invisible. He will have left signs of his crafting, “look at this cleverly constructed cog;” “the watchmaker was here.” He will make sure I appreciate the determined quirkiness of the protagonist before allowing that individual to proceed with the plot. I could blame myself: the watchmaker thinks I am too stupid to notice.

Sometimes the watchmaker can’t decide which cog pleases him more, and even though both cogs serve the same function, he leaves both in: “She’s cordon bleu meets Detroit, she’s Julia Child if she were Aretha Franklin,” says Claire in Audrey Niffenberger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. The two sentences convey the same information and in essentially the same way: Motown Mammy’s a mighty fine cook. Engineering redundancy is important to keep airplanes from falling out of the sky (that’s why they have two wings), but it weighs down fiction.

Sometimes I can tell on the first sentence, sometimes it takes a couple pages: I cannot fall into this world because it is no world, just an elaborate puppet show. Countless books have disappointed me in this way, and I have nearly given up on contemporary fiction. Only nearly though, because I am an incorrigible optimist. I still come home from the used bookstore with a stack of books, some vetted in the store, some I’ve never heard of, some because—meh—the cover was pretty, and it cost a buck.

That’s how I came to own Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection. It cost a dollar, and I was looking for mysteries to send my sister. I started reading it. Unwin, the protagonist, is coming up with pretexts for being at the train station. He’s there watching a woman in a plaid coat. There are details that should not be mistaken for clues and details that don’t look like clues, but in a couple hundred pages, I learn that those details are clues. But I don’t need to know that yet. I don’t yet need to know much. I don’t need to know anything more than what Unwin knows, so I am as unprepared as he is for his promotion from clerk to detective. Unwin does not want to be a detective. He is a C-L-E-R-K, and a good one. But to get his job back, he must find the missing detective whose place he has taken.

Unwin doesn’t know how to begin detecting, and because he’s not really a detective, he doesn’t want to look in his newly issued Manual of Detection. He bumbles around a slickly raining city, and succeeds only in piling more questions onto the still-unanswered first questions. This city through which he must traipse is dark and ominous, but not so ominous as the carnival on the edge of the city. And these questions that Unwin must answer arise organically from his activities, and—as the third act begins and Unwin finally starts to find answers—the answer fit symmetrically and naturally within this fanciful world.

I read this book slowly because I want to savor not knowing what is going on, to enjoy not being able to anticipate its direction. It will be the only time I will read this book, and not know what is important and what isn’t. I don’t yet know that it is all important. I won’t read slowly or carefully enough, because my need to know will eventually overpower my desire to enjoy. I will re-read it slowly, later, to take in all the things I know are important. I will marvel at all the ways the author didn’t draw attention to his cleverness, didn’t leave his fingerprints to smudge his world.

You probably shouldn't steal a copy, but if you do, know that you might get caught. If you get caught, telling the bookstore proprietor that I told you to steal that book is unlikely to excuse you from prosecution. And offering to pay me money to go through my crap, while it might seem like a viable option, probably won't work out either because I'm terribly lazy and think my time is worth a lot more than I can get anyone else to support. So your best bet is to just believe me.  Trust me, baby, trust me.