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Struck

Stephen Osborne

One of the pleasures of the 3-Day Novel is the strong sense of participation given to its readers, who as they read can feel the book being written, a procedure that can be described as a kind of striving to continue ‘finding’ the story as time goes by inexorably and the pages turn: everything is constrained by the real and imagined circumference of seventy-two hours. A novel known to be written in three days by intention provides an element of suspense not found in other genres: we are aware of the author writing as we are aware of a tightrope walker performing without a net. The protagonist in Geoffrey Bromhead’s three-day novel Struck (winner of the 25th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest) is a drifter with a penchant for being struck by lightning, and with some practical experience of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and he reminds us of Slothrop, the hero of Gravity’s Rainbow (by Thomas Pynchon), a much longer novel constructed with the physics of falling bodies rather than the physics of quantum particles, which are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The procedure of story-finding in Struck appears on page 2 in a chance encounter between a little girl who is playing with a toy that we are told she will lose, and the protagonist, who gives her a ten-dollar bill in a sentence that goes on fearlessly to a moment in the future when her mother will find the money and use it to replace the lost toy. This sounds easy; it even looks easy; but it ain’t easy and it gets better and better. A satisfying read.

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Stephen Osborne

Stephen Osborne is a co-founder and contributing publisher of Geist. He is the award-winning writer of Ice & Fire: Dispatches from the New World and dozens of shorter works, many of which can be read at geist.com.


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