The book I’m thinking of is Nothing But the Truth, a junior-high/high school level book by AVI.
If you haven’t read it, there’s no narration going on. The book is completely made up of things like “Conversation between Phillip Malloy and Ms. Narwin, Tuesday, Sept. 19, 9:53 a.m.” and “Letter from Ms. Narwin to her sister, written Monday, Sept. 25., 10:03 p.m.”
The letters are presented as just the contents themselves, the conversations are presented as pure dialogue:
Phillip: I was humming.
Narwin: You were humming?
etc. No “stage direction,” no exposition, no “Phillip thought …”
Are there any other books that do this? Sort of tell a story through documents, without a real narrator? It seems like sort of an objective and dispassionate way to tell a story, but it’s interesting.
Stephen King’s Carrie is framed through documents (psychologist reports, news clippings, court transcripts, that sort of thing) in this manner, although it’s interspersed with more conventional fiction. Even if you’re not particularly a fan of Stephen King, I think Carrie is worth a read.
Isn’t there some straight narration in Carrie, though? I remember scenes where it went into x character felt this, or y character thought blah blah. There was a heavy usage of documents as you say, but I’m pretty sure I remember the other stuff, too.
Nothing But the Truth is a good read. I’m trying to think of other books that follow that model, but I’m having a hard time of that. The only thing that really comes to mind is the inverse of that–In Cold Blood which novelizes something that really did happen.
The ultimate epistolary novel is John Barth’s Letters subtitled “An old time epistolary novel by seven fictional drolls & dreamer wech of which imagines himself factual” where the letters themselves are characters (and their dates and first letters are part of the story). Not for everyone, but a triumph of structure.
Sorcery and Cecilia by Patricia C Wrede and Caroline Nelson Douglas is written as a series of letters between two young women in an alternate universe England; each author writing one set of letters. It originated as a game between the two, and they liked the reults enough to clean it up and release it as a novel. They’ve written other books in the same world, but the series originated here.
Emergence be David R. Palmer. Written as the diary of a girl who’s survived the death of most of humanity via bioweapon. She survived because she’s one of the very few examples of the next step in human evolution, and generally superior to normal humans, including a superior immune system.
Z is for Zachariah, a book I read as a kid; the diary of a young woman who is the sole survivor she knows of of a nuclear war, until a man in a radiation suit show up. She survived due to freak climate conditions in the valley she’s in; the bombs seem to have done most of the killing by fallout; everything outside the valley appears to be dead.
Alan Dean Foster wrote an amusing short story, called Swamp Planet Christmas IIRC, consisting of a collection of interstellar E-mails between various people and computers.
House of Leaves may qualify. It’s supposed to be a book edited together from rough draft pages and assorted research materials (collected/researched by the author, who was looking into a family’s experience with a “haunted” house), with the editor’s notes on the topic (and his own life) in the footnotes and margins, and then another editor at the publishing company helping tie together some other parts. The base “book” is composed of a lot of interviews, transcripts of film, excerpts from analyses of the events that happened, etc. Depending on the edition you buy, there may also be a supplement made up of letters from the mother of the first editor, to him.
Nobody in this bunch has mentioned Flowers for Algernon yet? The original story (not the expanded novel, which I haven’t read) is all in the form of letters, reports, and the like.
Lawrence Saunders’s The Anderson Tapes relates the tale of a heist told after the fact via wiretap transcripts and witness statements, so I think it fits.
The Dracula Tapes, written as a transcript of audiotapes left by, well, Dracula. It’s the story of the original novel, written from his perspective. And as pointed out in another thread, he’s quite the spinmeister.