Karen Joy Fowler writes novels the way Kelly Link writes short stories – painstaking, elaborate, funny, with surprisingly modern sensibilities alongside beautiful language. (the kicker of course is that Karen Joy Fowler also writes short stories like this, but that’s not the point of this review) I’ve read several of Fowler’s novels now, including the hugely successful The Jane Austen Book Club (really must get around to seeing the movie), my favourite being The Sweetheart Season, about the American female baseball league during the war.

Fowler’s novels are eclectic, but each clings fiercely to its themes and subject matter, making for a very satisfying reading experience.

The Case of the Imaginary Detective (published as Wit’s End in some countries, a far better title) wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I knew it was a book in which Fowler interrogated the detective fiction genre, and had even read summaries of the plot, but somehow in my head it was set in the 1930′s or 1940′s, like Jo Walton’s Farthing… but what I got instead was something more akin to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition!

Rima is a wounded soul, having lost her mother, brother and most recently, her father. Needing somewhere to assemble her thoughts, she is staying with her godmother Addison, a famous crime novelist who has not produced a new book in more than two years. The house is full – of dollhouses set up for each of Addison’s literary crime scenes, of dogs, of secrets, of memories of Rima’s father, who may or may not have had an affair with Addison, and most notably of Maxwell Lane, the fictional detective.

Even as Rima tries to get her head together, she finds herself obsessed with Maxwell Lane, and other elements of Addison’s books – particularly the book Ice City, in which the murderer bore the name of Rima’s father. Mysterious women appear, in person and on the internet, all claiming to know more about Rima’s father and brother than she herself does. All the clues lead to a cult which may or may not have ties to Addison’s early years and the formation of Maxwell Lane. Rima is determined to solve the case, even if the people around her remain frustratingly unaware that there is a case to be solved.

For the most part, The Case of the Imaginary Detective is about grief, and the games we play with our mind in order to deal with the devastating reality of losing the people we care most about. This is Rima’s story, but by no means the only story that the book has to offer. Fowler also explores the line between fiction and reality, and how different people perceive that line. The most interesting part of the story for me was the exploration of Rima’s father’s three separate existences: as the flawed, normal, real individual she knew as her father; as the smooth and erudite newspaper columnist who rewrote his own life (and by association, her life, especially her awkward teenage years) for the entertainment of the masses; and as a fictional character in one of Addison’s books, who murdered his wife.

There’s also a lot in the narrative about privacy and ownership, especially as it pertains to the internet, and that ties back to the way that people often feel they have particular claims to other people in life, and how badly they react when they are proved otherwise. Rima’s privacy is compromised constantly throughout the novel – by the housekeeper who enters and cleans her room without asking; by her late father who thought nothing of breaching her trust in order to publicly portray himself as a good parent; by the fans on the forums who confuse the fictional Bim Lanisell with the real one and thus assume Rima is the daughter of a murderer; by Addison and her dogwalker, who both blog about Rima as well as her brother Oliver and his death; and of course by the fanficcers, who not only slash Bim Lanisell with Maxwell Lane, but happily incorporate Rima herself into their work.

The thing I love most about Karen Joy Fowler novels is that while they are not technically genre fiction, they often behave as if they were. The descriptions of everyday technology and how people use it are so very – well, 2006. [the book was published in 2008] This is a world before Twitter and iPhones, but one very much concerned with blogging, web forums, Second Life style 3D multimedia environments, and so on. It’s this interest in changing technology and how people are incorporating it into their lives that reminded me of Pattern Recognition, another novel which wasn’t technically science fiction, but presented current technology in such a way that it felt like maybe it was.

Rather than be concerned about the book “dating” thanks to the specific use of technology, Fowler has embraced this fact, making the book a time capsule of pop culture as well. Characters don’t just go to the movies, they go to see “Borat.” Addison is reading a book which can only be Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. There are a few elements of fictional pop culture too, not least Addison’s high profile series of crime novels, but it’s the detailed real world aspects which I really enjoyed. Crime novels in particular are quite often guilty of ignoring current technological advances, or coming to them late, because quite frankly technological advances screw with murder mysteries something shocking. Also, the technology is changing so fast…

This ties in with a conversation I was having recently with  random_alex about Going Bovine, a brilliant book with only one flaw: it posits a world with Star Wars. Or, as Alex put it, a world in which Star Wars is basically not that important. More and more, while I enjoy the inventiveness of fictional pop culture in novels, I have trouble raising the necessary suspension of disbelief to accept the erasure of real pop culture. I also find myself really enjoying books that are dated, and dated hard. It’s all worldbuilding, after all, regardless of whether you’re using genuine or madey-uppy elements!

If you’ve read and enjoyed Fowler’s fiction in the past, or if you have an interest in the crime genre, or if you just plain like books, this is a good one to get your teeth into. If you haven’t read her before… what are you waiting for? These are literary novels built for genre readers.

Tags: crime, jo walton, karen joy fowler, pop culture, reading, reviewing, william gibson