The notion of a public square as the main character of a novel could not be more appealing. Not only does it have the potential to be a meta-character, shaping and distilling the village's shared characteristics and struggles, but its role lends itself to comparisons with an island or a stage on which appearance is more or less compulsory (the well is in its center). A public square as a character could make visible the creative process of constructing the everyday. When major events occur, they occur there as well, shaping in turn and being shaped by that everyday.

Our main character in Geometric Regional Novel is meticulously described, down to its number of tiles (although that number is not amended once the trees are uprooted entirely), but fails to make that everyday visible on anything like a consistent basis. Every other chapter is devoted to a description of some modification made to it, some event there (usually quite dramatic: a troop of acrobats, soldiers recruiting young boys, a flood) and finally, its traversal by the narrator and his 2nd person interlocutor.

But instead of acting on that stage a nuanced portrayal that includes creativity by the people in a bottom-up process, Jonke chooses to portray his village square almost entirely as a site for the exercising of bureaucratic power. Regulations are written out at exhaustive length, making up some of the book's "experimental" content. Nor are the edicts of the state necessarily stiff and formal; worse, they're whimsical. The village square becomes the site of convergence not only for the people of the village, but also the whims of nature and government. When the citizens are described, it's as impotently grumbling or positively cleaving to their leaders. It's not the lack of individuation that I mind, but the lack of will.

Jonke's tone in the narration both mimics and mocks bureaucracy, but the technique of obsessive observation he uses is so close to the real thing that it sees no way out; instead, two mirrors face each other and create an infinite regress, letting only bureaucratic power be seen as far as the atoms of the individual's "soul." And I use that word advisedly, since the faults I see in Geometric Regional Novel parallel the faults that Michel de Certeau criticized in Foucault: that his method of researching history was so bureaucratic -- it imitated so perfectly the power structures he sought to critique -- that it was only natural if all he could see was bureaucratic power.

Let me offer instead a model of observation from the bottom up that I would have hoped to see Jonke at least broach in this novel. You've perhaps heard of the Japanese man whose blog is dedicated to a single vending machine and its changes. He has taken a photo of the same vending machine almost every week day for about 3 years now, and offers comparisons of his daily snapshots with the pictures he took a year ago on the same day. What was invisible to consumers -- the tastes of the people nearby, the way that marketing works -- becomes visible, and allows knowledge to disseminate. This model of observation shows a man not passively being acted upon, but watching the careful calculations and modifications of those who watch him. What arises from this inter-level loop is not the cynical exercise of the same kind of power (we know who will win that battle, who is better practiced at its exercise), but a new consciousness of how our "new nature" (to quote Barthes) works at many levels simultaneously.

The idea of Geometric Regional Novel is so vastly appealing that I wanted it to succeed. I would love to see a novel that explored a single place with nuance and affection, even if that affection were not unmixed. Jonke's idea is fantastic, but the story he made of it wallows in the murk of rote mocking of bureaucracy, banal experimentation, and thoughtless conclusions. ( )