At Swim-Two-Birds

Flann O'Brien may indeed have been Irish, but At Swim-Two-Birds is nothing if not a Russian doll of a novel, made up of stories that nest within stories. O'Brien's unnamed slacker narrator ignores his university studies, becoming instead a student of loafing; yet between idling in bed, carousing in pubs, and playing hooky, he still manages to write. His story revolves around writer-hero Dermott Trellis who attempts to put to the page a tale of inescapable misfortune populated by a battery of villains and ne'er-do-wells. Angered by Trellis's tyranny over their every action—not to mention Trellis's impregnation of his leading lady Sheila Lamont—the characters plot a revolt unbeknownst to their author. Orlick, the lovechild of Trellis and Sheila Lamont, even drafts his own vengeful novel in which Trellis is arrested and tortured for his wrongdoings. Unlike Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author," in which the author is outmoded by the reader, At Swim-Two-Birds depicts the author as an overthrown dictator at the mercy of his unwieldy work. It is metafiction at its best: fiction testing its traditional boundaries in order to represent the anxiety of artistic creation itself. And that's how you kill two birds with one tome.