At one point, a character argues against the existence of a parallel world, but the two main characters in 1Q84 (Q=”a world that bears a question”) are absolutely convinced that they live not in a parallel world but in a replica of one, where they do not want to be. The world we had is gone, and all we have now is a simulacrum, a fake, of the world we once had. “At some point in time,” a character muses, “the world we I knew either vanished or withdrew, and another world came to take its place.“
This idea, which used to be the providence of science fiction and French critical theory, is now in the mainstream, and it has created a new mode of fiction—Jonathan Letham’s Chronic City is another recent example—that I would call “Unrealism.” Unrealism reflects an entire generation’s conviction that the world they have inherited is a crummy second-rate duplicate.
— Charles Baxter, “Behind Murakami’s Mirror,” New York Review of Books, 8 December 2011
Throughout, Lerner tries hard to overcome our skepticism that poses special problems for the novelist today. As prose fiction is pushed further toward the margins of popular entertainment, as it becomes a more and more exotic form of storytelling, we notice its most basic conventions more. Like Adam, we are more apt to ask inappropriate, even extraliterary questions of a first-person narrator, such as: What sort of person goes on this way about his or her life? Why is a supposedly realistic character talking/writing in this artificially lyrical mode? What is the author trying to prove by writing a novel, of all things? These are questions that Augie March or Frank Bascombe or even the traditional narrator of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland are not equipped to answer, any more than Carmen could explain why she keeps bursting into song.
—Lorin Stein, “‘The White Machine of Life’,” New York Review of Books, 8 December 2011