The World’s First Wiki Novel?

Some critics of Wikipedia have complained that the site’s communal-editing ethic tends to quash individual expression. For an encyclopedia, that may not be much of a problem. But a group-edited novel? To literary critics, that idea may sound like the kiss of death.

Nevertheless, a group of students at De Montfort University, in Leicester, England, are going to give the Wiki novel a shot, according to The Guardian. They’ve invited Web surfers across the world to contribute to an open-source book sponsored by Penguin Books, the publishing house.

The novel already has seven chapters, and so far it looks a bit, well, scattered. A few passages seem to attempt a jokey lyricism: As the last notes of the Vivaldi concerto faded away in the background, he began to think about food. He wanted a thick grilled sirloin with a generous serving of pommes frites. He imagined dragging a chip through the bloody juices, a French chip, fried til its outside was diamond crisp, biting through to the fluffy, steaming center.

But other sections read like they came from a cut-rate erotic novel:
Just getting their pants off, the dawn sun lighting the top of the Rockies, the guys entered a small coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado. A diminutive waitress approached. She gave them a table near the window and then took their orders. “I would like two coffees, black no sugar” He said, looking up at her sullen little face. “And perhaps I’ll take a waffle with blueberry syrup too, baby.”

Update: Within minutes, one of the aforementioned passages — “the guys entered a small coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado” — had already been edited. For the time being, it’s “two young muscular anonymous american proletarian factory workers, looking like they had walked straight off a Socialist realist propaganda poster,” stopping in for a coffee. Nabokov it ain’t, but the Wiki novel should be fun to keep track of, thanks to fast-paced editing like that. —Brock Read