It was during the COVID lockdowns of 2020 that the bottom fell out of my decade-long shirk to the question, “Why not write a novel?” After years of working on short stories and short poems and short essays—compressed forms which shakily (but reliably) paired with my tenure as overwhelmed parent/underpaid teacher/quasi-functional alcoholic—I suddenly possessed the fundamental prerequisite for the longform—time.

I still don’t know if time slowed down during COVID (I have brilliant friends who claim it did), but it most certainly (for me) opened up. I shifted into remote work, and the lack of a commute alone generated eight new hours each week to invest in a creative project.

I taught asynchronous courses, and my students were miraculously low-maintenance, a combination which seemed to tack on another dozen or so hours. And then there was the bittersweet release from social obligations (especially those multi-state road trips to visit distant family), a change which amounted to extra weeks built into the year.

As that balmy spring morphed into a blistering summer, and as it became increasingly clear that this pandemic would not, despite the evangelical insistence of aforementioned distant family, “just go away,” I resigned myself to this new normality of more (and in many ways more free) time, and I began work on what would become my first novel.

In the screwy arithmetic of my mind, more time meant more aspiration. I wouldn’t just write a novel—I would write an eight-hundred-page bone-crusher. A coming-of-age tome set in the South during the months leading up to Y2K. Think Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov meets Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Think The Catcher in the Rye—only way longer, way weirder, and Southern.

It would have a massive cast, and it would have a sprawling plot, and it would stretch out between covers like something begging to be made into a show with ten seasons and a prequel. I had my speaker (Junah, a precocious loner with a lot to say about the apocalypse), and I had my situation (Junah receives on the first day of middle-school an “assignment” to fill a shoebox with “what it was like to be alive in Carolina at the end of the world”).

And since the speaker/situation foothold was the only foothold I ever needed to get started on the short stuff, I went to work on the novel as if it was the short stuff. Which is to say, I cracked open a new Word doc and a began to pepper its white space with scenes and fragments and voicy little riffs, all of which felt faithful to Junah’s intelligence and connected to Junah’s situation, but none of which necessarily corresponded to novelistic mechanisms such as the “structured” plot, the “measured” tone, and the “well-developed” character.

I wrote scrap after scrap after scrap, fine-tuning syntax (while more or less half-assing the dramatic action) and fixating over things like recurring metaphors and associative winks (as opposed to working on the relationship between, say, a sympathetic lead and interesting “stakes”).

I wrote, in other words, a novel that read nothing like a novel; and when faced with this discrepancy, I told myself that I would in time supplement the “bones” of the early drafts with all requisite “connective tissue” so that, when it finally went off to publishers, it would resemble nothing less than flesh-and-blood longform. I told myself this lie, and for much of 2020, I think I actually believed it.

The truth I was too desperate (read: too dumb) to embrace—in large part because I couldn’t surrender the sad and ancient fantasy of getting a “real” novel picked up by a “real” publisher who might shell out enough “real” money to pay down at least part of my soul-shattering mountain of debt—was that I was not writing an eight-hundred-page bone-crusher likely to resonate with readers on the basis of plot, setting, and character.

I was writing a hundred-page shoebox likely to resonate with readers on the basis of voice, fragment, and flow. What I wrote, in the end, was an anti-novel. A mixtape. A collage. A text which mimics its conceit: the book the reader holds is the time capsule Junah culls out of his lived life; the shards on the page, the shards of his memory.

And what I discovered (and it pains me to present this as an epiphany, since in 2020 I was three books and fifteen years into my career) is that a pandemic is not an excuse to write the book you can sell—it’s an excuse to write the book you can love.

And I do love how Junah at the End of the World turned out. I love it for its commitment to non-linearity, I love it for its rejection of the novelistic conventions that stifle me (both as a reader and as a writer), and I love it because it gets to share a subgenre with the five anti-novels gathered here, any one of which will stay stuck in your head for weeks on end and remind you that life’s too short (and the apocalypse’s too near) to write in a form that doesn’t set you on fire.

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Michael Bible, Sophia

“I’m a nautical man on my small filthy yacht since the bank took my house.” So opens arguably the best anti-novel of the last decade—Sophia by Michael Bible. This criminally underrated gem from Southern literature’s heir apparent to the generation of mad stylists like Barry Hannah and Lewis Nordan isn’t just a rebellion against novelistic dead weight—it’s a rebellion against any printed syllable that isn’t exploding with the concurrent mysteries of sound and sense.

Technically speaking, Sophia has a plot (Reverend Alvis T. Maloney gets into and out of trouble with his best friend and chess savant Eli), but I’ve never heard anyone discuss it. What I have heard, though, in the late-night phone call that inevitably follows some friend having read the paperback copy of Sophia I sent them in the mail, is a gushy and stuttering attempt (futile in the end) to describe the exhilaration of moving through Bible’s sentences.

Like Ray did for its generation, Sophia proves that one little book willing to fill every word with lightning is worth more than the milquetoast marketability of a thousand best sellers. Whenever I was tempted, in the drafting of Junah at the End of the World, to bend my book’s weirdness to fit some passing trend or convention, I reread Sophia, and I remembered why I bother to write at all.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Described by one critic as a “nomadic mosaic,” Bluets was my gateway drug into fragmentary prose and associative jumps. Along with Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments and David Shields’ Reality Hunger, Nelson’s anti-novel is like a mixtape without a single bad or boring song. Which is to say, each of the 240 fragments that make up Bluets sings like a standalone poem (yet also miraculously coheres into a book-length meditation on love and suffering).

During COVID, I would walk for hours in the woods behind my house and listen to the audiobook of Bluets on repeat. It’s read by Nelson herself; and though it’s known as a smart book, it’s also a deeply intimate book, and its lines lodged themselves in my mind for weeks on end.

Lines like this: “The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.” Or: “There is a color inside of the fucking, but it is not blue.” Or: “When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”

This is the endlessly re-readable magic I was going for with Junah at the End of the World: a box of cuts worthy to get stuck inside a head.

Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy’s

I love a book that commits to its conceit. Take Letters to Wendy’s, which tells its story via a year’s worth of customer comment cards, all submitted by an unnamed narrator who treats the fast-food space as a conduit for existential riffing.

This book has razor-sharp critiques of commodified sexuality and modern alienation. This book has sentences (or lines?) so sonically resonant and philosophically interesting that you will linger on a page for half an hour. This book even has a chapter (now infamous) in which the speaker achieves sexual intimacy with a Frosty.

Hilarious, heartbreaking, and brilliantly-written, Letters to Wendy’s was the anti-novel I returned to constantly when I was contemplating whether or not Junah at the End of the World could truly stand on its own as a “time capsule.”

Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

The work of most contemporary novels is the work of grounding: fix the reader to a solid artifice (preferably plot) and maintain that attachment for seventy-thousand words. This is a wonderful (read: saleable) strategy if the goal is to deliver a constant sense of familiarity.

But for those who want to leave the ground and feel, if not a little lost then at least a little dizzy, see Olga Tokarczuk’s masterpiece Flights. The Guardian called it “a cacophony of voices and stories.” James Wood called it “unclassifiable” and said it was fit to stand alongside Moby Dick. Tokarczuk herself called it a “constellation novel” designed to replicate the sensation of nonlinear travel.

Delivered in dense (but lush) fragments that braid themselves against disparate registers (imagine reading a mini-essay stuck between a folk tale and a catalogue), Flights is an anti-novel that trusts its readers to make associative jumps across its diversity of modalities. It’s a brilliant book from a clear genius, and I returned to it during the drafting stage of Junah at the End of the World, especially when I needed the reminder that the book itself (not some outside convention or trend) makes the rules for intratextual movement.

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

This is the most questionable entry on the list since in many ways Murakami’s six-hundred-and-twenty-four-page opus functions precisely like a traditional novel. It’s written in traditional (if not occasionally pedestrian) prose, and it features a traditional everyman (Toru Okada) who answers a traditional call to adventure (to recover a missing cat) only to stumble onto a traditional hero’s quest (to save a missing partner).

My argument, however—not only for Wind-Up Bird’s status as an anti-novel but also for its enduring appeal with both literary and general readers—is that the traditional mechanisms highlighted above only account for half the actual page space. Murakami’s brilliance with this book is that he surrounds (or maybe “entangles” would be the better verb) an immensely novelistic core with dozens of anti-novelistic (or what used to be called “postmodern”) mechanisms.

This includes the epistolary intrusions of May Kasahara, the labyrinthine computer files of Cinnamon Akasaka, and the deeply discursive frame stories of Lieutenant Mamiya (which could easily exist as a self-standing novella); but it also includes pseudo-newspaper articles, excerpts from whatever history book Toru happens to be reading, and those infamous and enigmatic third-person vignettes towards the end which no scholar has ever adequately explained.

What is the effect of these anti-novelistic devices? Depth (in terms of its world) and variation (in terms of its voices). This and the sense that Murakami wasn’t writing a novel—he was just climbing down into an empty well (to use the book’s primary metaphor) to see what kinds of forms might come together in the darkness.

With its single narrator and modest length, Junah at the End of the World probably doesn’t seem like a literary cousin of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; but as I sought to write my way out of the pandemic, Murakami’s book hung in my mind like a cat without a home.

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Junah at the End of the World by Dan Leach is available via Hub City Press.