A hard-working book, packed with information and insight, wide-ranging, probing, original. I wish it were more attractively written. But of that later.
My introduction to Semi-detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens, came when I picked up the book and read chapter 1, “Pertinent Fiction: Short Stories into Novels.” I have long been a fan of the great late-century short story writers, and Plotz's discussion entranced me. “Since Dickens” (1812–70) here starts, rather oddly, with James Hogg (1770–1835) and John Galt (1779–1839). But then oddness is what the book is all about. Plotz invents the term polydoxy to characterize Hogg's unstable overlays of incompatible explanations of the events in his stories and then for the “befuddled narrator” (30) in the stories of Galt's last decade. These quirky narratives and other deformed sketches—Edgar Allan Poe's “Man of the Crowd” is the instance here—provide a context for Dickens's Sketches by...
