Clark Gifford's Body by Kenneth Fearing

 A radio station is taken over by a band of revolutionaries in a country that is not unlike the USA, a place where "autumn weather always spells football," but which is not the United States. This insurrection is at the center of the novel, and from that center ("During") the novel spreads out  through a series of accounts from different times: "Two Months After;" "Eight Years Later;" "The Day After;" "Two Years Before, " and from different perspectives including: "Production Director at WRO," "Waiter in Fenchon's," "in the office of Governor Holling," and twenty or so more. We come to understand the event, or to understand that there is no simple explanation of it or the larger rebellion of which it is a part, no single perspective which gives us the truth about it.

At the center of that ambiguity is the revolutionary leader Clark Gifford, and this ambiguity makes the form Fearing has chosen entirely appropriate. Gifford,  who we meet mostly through the eyes of others, has no stable identity. It depends on who encounters him, and when and where they meet. Thus the fragmented form of Clark Gifford's Body works, and in fact drives the novel. The prose itself is often pedestrian, but the kaleidoscopic manner in which Fearing organizes it makes the novel worth the price of admission.

Critics, alas, did not agree. Wikipedia informs us that, "The novel's experimental aspects and pessimism were not met well by readers." Perhaps now, in a time when it is clear how important control of the media is, "readers" will be more receptive.