The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas

It's a wonderfully wonky meta narrative incorporating phone transcripts, online clippings, extensive interviews and psychological assessments, interspersed among detective noir, literary fiction, gonzo journalism and biography creating a nesting Matryoshka doll of a story that extends outward beyond Daniel James the biographer to an anonymous curator who extensively footnotes the collection and even spills out into our world with the Maas Foundation website and its ever vigilant Twitter account.

It's the literary equivalent of a late night internet rabbit hole where you start out looking to rebalance your dryer and end up realizing the Large Hadron Collider is actually a trans-dimensional portal intended to awaken Osiris the Egyptian God of Death but has been repeatedly thwarted by time travellers desperate to sabotage the effort. The story ducks into dark alleyways, spirals into philosophical tangents, name drops effusively, and invokes quantum mechanics. It is a post-truth, internet enabled conspiracy of a novel.

Ezra Maas has been wiped from our collective memory. A seminal figure in the New York art scene of the 70's, a contemporary of Thomas Pynchon and Hunter S. Thompson, the artistic precursor to Banksy and Shepard Fairey, his works have been systematically and rigorously extricated from the public eye. Daniel James is out to uncover the truth despite the best efforts of the shadowy Maas Foundation.

I will quibble with the overzealous footnoter constantly pulling us away from the main narrative to less than helpfully inform us that Umberto Eco is an Italian novelist and philosopher and that the Oststrand can be found on the banks of the river Spree in Berlin as if he's embedded Wikipedia searches into the story. But I can still applaud the sheer, swing for the fences, commitment to the bit, overflowing into the world of social media and the attempt to manufacture a Mandela effect in regards to the enigmatic Ezra Maas. That is some next level marketing hustle paired with a page-turner of a read.