The Manual of Detection. Jedediah Berry. 2009. 

This novel came out the year before the film Inception and has a storyline that reminds me of it, both being about entering the dreams of others and manipulating their perceived reality through suggestion in the dream state. The differences are that Berry’s novel is humorous with a noir-mood overlay, being set somewhere in the 1930s, a time without contemporary technology. The story revolves around a woman (Cleo Greenwood) and her daughter, who are masters of hypnotism and dream “detection.” The central character, Charles Unwin, is a clerk who works for an Agency whose agents are pawns of upper-echelon handlers called “Watchers.” The watchers do all the real detective work in the dreams of agents and suspects. Thematically simple in its focus on the coterminous territory of order and chaos and the need for an internal doppelganger of sorts to provide mystery in one’s life, the novel is most interesting to me in its way of exposing the relationship between storytelling and interpreting, that is, between storyteller and intended (or unintended) reader. Berry’s novel is also simply quite fun to read, a carnivalesque romp that makes much of the chaos that ensues when people simply don’t wake up but go through their everyday routines while still in dream states. (This reminds me of Gaiman’s Sandman, specifically those first few episodes of the series and the Hector and Lyta Hall section of volume two.)  Much is made of mirror selves, and the doppelganger feature is played to the extreme in a house-of-mirrors scene. With clever intertextual references, like including an actual carnival and calling it “Caligari’s Carnival” (here’s an obvious allusion to Michael Hoffmann but also a reminder of the E.T.A. Hoffman story world) ,” Barry’s novel is a postmodern reader’s funhouse.

Margaret. Dir. Kenneth Lonergan. 2011. 

In this film (screenplay also by Kenneth Lonergan) Lisa, a rebellious teenager of uptown Manhattan, is wracked by guilt after she distracts a bus driver, causing him to run a red light and kill a pedestrian. The adults in Lisa’s life, including her actor mother and long-distance father, fumble with their own challenges as Lisa becomes more and more surly and manipulative. I think the film’s greatest strength is its presentation of a range of defense mechanisms that keep characters isolated from one another. An interesting study of self-destructive isolation by several characters. An interesting cast, including Anna Paquin, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, a cameo by Allison Janney, and even Renée Fleming playing herself.