REALITY STREET

WHITE is an immense feat of close description of an unnamed city during a single day in summer. Open-field sections convey the immediate sensations of a person wandering the city. Continuous prose sections give vignettes of objects and events in the city. The prose is dispassionate, uninflected, solely focused on surfaces. There is no plot development; indeed, cause and effect remain a mystery.

This novel could be said to have modernist antecedents: the action encompassing a single day in a city inevitably recalls Ulysses, and the narrative technique has affinities with nouveau roman. But actually it’s like neither, and like nothing else.