| Sumario: | This article considers British author Jeff Noon's most recent novel Falling out of Cars (2002) as a literary experiment engaged in raising the ghost of the modern novel, long hailed as dead. Here, Noon samples canonic literature then transforms, manipulates, and reconfigures it in much the same way a message is transformed when being passed through a communication circuit. The result is a kind of poetic prose Noon terms "metamorphiction": an elegant experimental mode of fantasy in which signs mutate within certain systemic parameters. In metamorphiction, the past haunts the present, the present haunts the past, and the possibilities of the future are haunted. This formal experiment is mirrored in the content; the novel concerns a middle-aged woman mourning the death of her daughter. Ultimately, Falling out of Cars is both a virtuosic piece of fantastic fiction and a serious meditation on the contemporary state of the novel.
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