It was somewhere between the sex scene on the glass table and the bit where Apollo Smintheus, eight foot tall mouse god, starts running around shooting people with his bow and arrows, that I decided that Scarlett Thomas was my new literary crush...said mouse god resides in the Troposphere, a metaphorical/imaginative/real space accessible by imbing a particular homeopathic concoction and then staring hard at a big black dot drawn on a piece of paper or cardboard; it's a realm in which all consciousness is connected, natch, and it's possible to 'surf' other peoples' minds through being and time.
Some of the many things which make The End of Mr Y so grand:
* The way that it connects up so many theorists and ideas in ways that I've done myself, and wraps them all up in a novel-narrative that's both crazy and compelling, and also ultimately satisfying - Heidegger-Derrida-language-consciousness-absence-being-phenomenology-postmodernism (with more fleeting references to, amongst others, Lacan and Poe) - and then some...the 'then some' including Baudrillard (who I've always vaguely disrespected and expected to be a rather facile thinker - but who I've never actually read and now think perhaps I should), Samuel Butler, and plenty of quantum physics.
* The wonderfully effective use made of the first person present tense voice - ideal for a phenomenological representation and conducive to both a clean postmodern flatness and lack of affect, and to an affecting and striking immediacy, according to what's most appropriate at any particular point.
* The unforced integration of contemporary technology - ipods, email, blogs, web searching. I read an article a while back which commented that people hadn't really worked out how to write about technology and its impacts yet (in fictional settings), which I thought was true as far as fiction in which said technology isn't front and centre goes (by contrast to, say, cyberpunk etc which is deliberately and centrally concerned with mapping out such impacts and relations), but Thomas does it as well as anyone.
* And, relatedly, the way that Thomas's voice is thoroughly of the now - hip, cynical, casually erudite, frequently profane - but still feels somehow classically literary.
Actually, as a novel, The End of Mr Y has plenty of flaws. But I forgive those flaws easily for, well, all of the above reasons and plenty more.
