About the Book
'A writer living and thinking his way to the frontiers of human society' SpectatorCameo is the life story of invented Irish novelist Ren Duka, who has unexpected, runaway international success with a prolific series of autofictional novels. What begins as a playful satire on literary ambition and the chaos of our times expands into a dazzling, polyphonic odyssey that challenges the border between fiction and reality. As the Ren Duka novels race outwards in widening circles of influence, we encounter Dina Tatangelo, cult novelist of the New York underworld; a Japanese manga artist whose work eerily affects his family life; a grizzled Dublin taxi driver who just might ferry his passengers between worlds; a film-star facing public disgrace; and Rob Doyle, an author enduring a psychic and ontological crisis.Cameo is at once a metaphysical architecture of the imagination, a human comedy full of unruly passions, and a self-portrait across multiple dimensions.
About the Author :
Rob Doyle is the author of four internationally acclaimed books: Autobibliography, Threshold, This is the Ritual, and Here Are the Young Men which was adapted as a film starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Dean-Charles Chapman, and was named as one of Hot Press magazine's '20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016'. Doyle's writing has appeared in the New York Times, Observer, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and his work has been translated into several languages. He is the editor of an anthology published by Dalkey Archive Press, The Other Irish Tradition, and the book In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep.
Review :
There is much to delight in. The satire is relentless but sharp, skewering everything from identity politics to the fickle nature of celebrity. The jokes are funny . . . and the prose is impeccable . . . Masterful
Rob Doyle's slutty third novel Cameo . . . A true thrill ride through heaven and hell
Like Swift before him, Rob Doyle is a social satirist of the highest order who exists entirely in a genre of one. Here the literary world - and, indeed, the true horrors of the real world - are examined with a sharp pen and keen eye for the utter absurdity of it all. From microscopic to widescreen, the picaresque stories of Ren Duka are first an exercise in obfuscation and then ultimately revelation, showing Doyle as a truly pan-international writer. Cameo is provocative, transgressive, grimly hilarious, and it surely can't be long until he spawns his own adjective. 'Doylean'? Don't rule it out
Curious, compassionate, filthy, iconoclastic . . . Cameo is mindbending fun and Rob Doyle yet again underlines his legend
Abject and gleeful, Cameo refracts selfhood into a dazzle of authors writing characters, writing authors, writing at the edges of the real. By rattling the self until it splits, Doyle has penned a peeling, serpentine novel for an age of shed certainties
Where I come from, when something is called mad it's often a good thing. Rob Doyle's new novel is very mad
It takes a truly exceptional writer to throw around a term as aggressively pretentious as 'quantum-auto-fiction', then have the gall to actually pull it off. Unlike anything I've ever read. A portrait of the artist from every conceivable angle
Impressively fast-paced, Cameo asks timely questions about authorship and our responsibility for the stories we send out in the world
Cameo is a unique and hilarious novel . . . a meta commentary on novels that cannot exist, with a series of destabilising Russian doll chapters that both summarise the outrageous content of Ren Duka's novels while undermining notions of authorship and origin in a hilarious and genuinely subversive hall of mirrors. Through this, Duka becomes an emblematic man of history, engaging with all the major events of recent times, from climate protest to Chinese interference, from being captured by ISIS to being cancelled for misogyny, a dazzling performance that seeks to restore the experimental literary novel back to its subversive origins
Doyle uses a proliferation of alter egos to lampoon the autofiction genre . . . A genuinely ingenious and, as far as I know, original format . . . All of Doyle's skills and virtues as a writer are on display here: his self-exposure, his interest in plumbing human depths, his instinct for a kind of comic-philosophical fiction, as comfortable with meditative aphorisms as it is with jagged riffs. But in this novel he's also done something else: simultaneously surmounting and retiring a genre. The original intent of autofiction was to create a sense of "authenticity", to reduce the artifice between writer and reader. By swamping this book with selves, Rob Doyle achieves something like the opposite, a suspension of belief, which allows the fiction to play even more freely
Beneath all the hijinks, Rob Doyle's purpose is deadly serious. For a generation reared on a sugar-rush diet of post-ironic pop culture, the respectable novel can look pretty creaky. Cameo is, in this sense, a remarkably successful attempt to forge a fictional mode that emulates the mythmaking swagger of hip-hop, upcycling those tired representational tropes with wit and flair. The result is terrific fun
