The Incognito Detective

Mark Anthony Cronin
Fiction
720 pgs.
2024
Paperback

Cronin’s self-styled “final meta-novel” takes up questions of authorship, intimacy, and self-understanding in a world shaped by artificial systems and mediated attention. Written as a millennial response to INFINITE JEST and A SCANNER DARKLY, the novel speaks from a historical moment defined by platforms, automation, and the collapse of distance between private thought and public record. Rather than standing outside its own ambitions, the book folds the figure of the author back into the life of the characters, allowing reputation, self-conception, and narrative authority to interfere with one another. Its intelligence stays bound to the difficulty of maintaining a coherent account of one’s life once explanation becomes inseparable from exposure.