not an un-constraint

for those of you that relish in seeing an author squirm under a self-imposed constraint (such as this one), or for those that like a healthy helping of gimmick with their literature, you might enjoy negativeland by doug nufer. from the village voice:

In Nufer’s latest book, Negativeland…every sentence contains a negative—the narrator, Chick, “can’t say yes.” An Olympic swimmer turned spa promoter, Chick lives in a Baudrillardian state of giddy nihilism, making idiotic statements like “He was simply because he was, we weren’t because he was, and we weren’t because we weren’t.” Convinced that “illusion … embraces all,” Chick has a pathologically overblown sense of his own fame. When he visits old friends, he hands out souvenirs—fake medals, earplugs, bathing caps.

Chick is hardly the first protagonist to entertain the suspicion that nothing is real (“everything … a wax museum!”) but he may be the first to have his paranoia cheered on by a steady stream of not’s, dis-’s, un-’s and -n’t’s. The more the health club circuit (which is “more hectic than Hollywood”) absorbs him, the more the negatives fly. He becomes convinced that everything is hollowed-out (“conversation [is] no more than a dialogue”)—an ironic but fitting conclusion to a book in which ideology is merely a by-product of form