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RICHARDSON, BRIAN. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. 166 pp. $24.95 paper; $55.95 cloth; $9.95 CD.
Brian Richardson's Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction presents a stimulating set of confrontations between the descriptive vocabulary and analytical techniques of narrative poetics on the one hand and modern and contemporary experimental fiction on the other hand. Richardson stages these confrontations to reveal the terminological and (in some cases) methodological lacunae that appear when we approach narrative theory by way of modern and contemporary fiction. I admire Richardson's creative genesis of new terms and tactics for dealing with the multiple and various exceptions to the rules that spring into focus when he looks at narrative poetics through the lenses provided by experimental fiction written by modern and contemporary writers (and the occasional prescient precursor). As Richardson puts it, his book is "an act of homage to this brilliant century of narrative innovation" (135), honoring the extreme narration and unnatural narrators that twentieth and twenty-first century writers created. The result of Richardson's effort in Unnatural Voices is a miraculously concise and rich reconsideration of models of narrative voice, narrators and narrative situation, narrative unreliability, and implied authors, to name only the most familiar of the concepts treated in these pages. In an age when short books often seem scanty, Unnatural Voices offers in its 166 pages eight provocative (and teachable) chapters, whose main claims...