Author(s): Charles Boyle

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Without a kink in the line there’s no story to tell. The kinks are the story.

There is gridlock on the M40 and a banana skin on every pavement. Lovers are disturbed in bed and my father becomes a rain god. Complacency is mocked. Death hovers. Shit happens. How the messiness of life is translated into fiction is considered and no conclusions are reached. Why, anyway, setting out from A, am I so sure that B is where I want to get to?

Interruptions push back, disrupting the status quo or derailing progress. 99 Interruptions – a cross-genre exploration of interruptions in both life and literature, and of the relationship between the two – attempts to take them in its stride.

‘I can’t think of a wittier, more engaging, stylistically audacious, attentive and generous writer working in the English language right now.’
     – Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian on An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B. by Jack Robinson, a pen name of Charles Boyle

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
1.   I sit down to write a review of Charles Boyle’s 99 Interruptions, but I no sooner put finger to keyboard than I urgently need the right word to describe the book’s appealing smallness. Is it a duodecimo or a sextodecimo, I wonder. I count the leaves, check the binding, trawl the internet. This is an out-of-date question, I realise eventually, and not really an interesting question anyway.
2.   To any given task the potential interruptions are infinite, but they do seem to fall into two categories: interruptions with an external source (family members, a cat fight in the back garden, a caller from Porlock) and interruptions with an internal source (useless questions about book format, random alerts from some malfunctioning mental appointments calendar, concerns about the underlying cause of various pains, the endless rephrasing of an imperfect conversation). Not that I really think there is a distinction between an internal and an external, I don’t believe in either after all, but it helps to halve infinity sometimes. 
3.   I will just interrupt the practical demands of my life to read this book, I thought, but the practical demands of my life, so to call them and so to call it, repeatedly interrupt my reading, even though the book is short. Two sets of interruptions grapple with each other over my attention. There are perhaps only interruptions (and interruptions to the interruptions).
4.   Sometimes the interruptions come even before whatever it is that they interrupt, in which case they are perhaps not interruptions to that activity but interruptions to the preconditions of that activity, to the preparations that are I suppose themselves some sort of activity but not identifiable as any activity in particular. Is most of my life these days lived in this state of velleity? 
5.   The first time I sat down to read read this book, 99 Interruptions, I was interrupted by finding a surprising quotation on the first page I came to, and then by finding that I had to check the source and context of that quotation.
6.   Without interruptions there is no story, Boyle shows. The interruptions are the story. An interruption disrupts the natural tendency to oversimplification (which is indistinguishable from nonexistence). 
7.   An interruption is the assertion of the particular against the pull of the general and the abstract. It is the prime quality of fiction. 
8.   An interruption breaks a continuum and causes two realities to mingle. I frequently find this irritating but at least my irritation is real irritation.  
9.   Is the fragment the only authentic contemporary literary form?
10.   Boyle remarks that, although most fiction is written in the past tense, a reader or critic invariably relates the narrative as happening in the present, “as if everything … is still happening and there’s no end in sight.” I hadn’t thought about this before, and thinking about it now is interrupting my progress through the book. 
11.   Fiction interrupts time by the introduction of a completely other thread of time, allowing the reader to jump between the two as inclination or interruption dictates. Before it is anything else, fiction is a sin against time, an interruption or eruption.
12.   In most situations I tend to feel that my presence is an interruption of whatever would otherwise be the case. This is probably not a very healthy way to think, but I cannot find a way in which it is not true. 
13.   I am actually writing a review, if you can call it that, but I am interrupted by that little repeated stifled sound coming from the headphones that S is wearing so that I am not interrupted by the music she is listening to. I won’t interrupt what she is busy doing over there on account of this; it is about time I accepted that the membrane between writing and real life (so to call it) is always entirely permeable. No wonder I never get anything done. 
14.   Would it be possible to welcome every interruption into the work itself? To create a work entirely of interruptions? (Like Boyle’s!)
15.   Be that as it may (does this construction even make sense?), the work is ultimately interrupted by its deadline.