By Dylan Kwok

Cameo
Rob Doyle
Weidenfeld & Nicholson (2026) / 288 pages / SGD 34.95

In the grand scheme of things, this particular death hardly warrants a eulogy, but still, some ink deserves to be spilt mourning the demise of standalone reading experience. Gone are the days one would wander into a bookstore or library, grab a title off the shelf, and stumble into its pages blind. Instead, in our crowded digital age, an entire sideshow has developed around reading where people check reviews, podcasts, interviews and talks to see whether a prospective book shows promise before ever cracking open the cover.

But to put all the blame on the Internet and its unending stimulation would be shallow. The Internet has only simplified what has been true all along: that people like reading about books almost as much as they like reading books. There is a certain thrill in reading how the cake was made, what critics thought of the cake, and how long the cake sat on the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Did I say cake? I meant book.

Rob Doyle's latest book attempts to sate both these desires in readers at once with a novel that is both a cake and a commentary on the cake. It's a metafictional satire covering the oeuvre of an invented author – one Ren Duka – containing summaries of 22 of his novels, excerpts from another two, and additional commentary from relevant contemporaries who admired him, from a novelist to an actor to a mangaka. Too straightforward? Doyle adds another layer by making Ren Duka's novels fictionalisations of Duka's own life, blurring the line between this invented author we are struggling to be acquainted with and his autofictionalised self. And while it sounds – and at times reads – like this multilayered metafiction would collapse from the weight of its own conceit, Doyle maintains structure and pace by inserting tantalising excerpts from Duka's other work to untangle confusion and flash Duka's writing chops to the reader – sublime morsels, which, rather unfortunately, is all we will ever get from the invented author. (Unless, of course, you consider the fact that the real writer of those passages is actually Doyle.)

Were you to wade into Cameo blind like I did, you might get the sense that there's an additional layer to the metafiction, and that Duka is himself a fictitious version of the novel's author, Rob Doyle. Some of the details seem to match. Globetrotter? Check. Dubliner? Check. Born in 1982? Check. Initials R.D.? Check. He wouldn't be the first to write an author surrogate more commercially successful than himself. And for a while the novel seems to entertain this idea as it charts the ups and downs of its troubled protagonist's canon of work.

And then Doyle introduces himself as a character writing Cameo four-fifths of the way into the novel.

My apologies if you consider that a spoiler. Initially I did, but I realised upon reflection (read: closing the book for a moment) the blurb explicitly mentions Doyle is a character in his own novel – something I missed, having skipped it on my way in.

(At last, a reminder there is still enjoyment to be had in entering books blind.)

But perhaps I should have realised he would do that. The epigraph is a quote from Borges's short story, 'Borges and I', explicitly contemplating the difference between the self and one's perception of self. But where the Borges story comes off as too on-the-nose – perhaps even appearing kitschy – for the modern reader, Cameo sidesteps the issue by ignoring any possible dissonance between Doyle the character and Doyle the author. Instead, his autofictional self speaks no different from his other characters, leaving the reader to guess where character Doyle ends and author Doyle begins. Did he really hallucinate the most interesting parts of the novel? Did his girlfriend really ditch him for a month because he was unbearable while writing it? Did his sister really eviscerate his lifestyle with such eloquence? Is his sister even real? (The acknowledgements recognise the girlfriend but interestingly omit his sister, perhaps because of the aforementioned evisceration.)

As expected of a book focused on the fictionalised life of an invented author, it refrains from unnecessary exposition on its other characters. We don't hear from character Doyle again. But his entire inclusion at all seems to goad the reader to investigate if Doyle really wrote about himself, or completely fabricated character Doyle. The only way to do so, of course, is to look him up – to access the literary sideshow that Cameo ostensibly eschews by packing all we need to know about Duka's life and work into its pages.

But maddeningly – almost as if he knew – Doyle currently sits at that sweet spot in the literary pantheon between visibility and ubiquity: searchable but with few concrete details of him online (and no headshot on Wikipedia).

Sometimes the satire really does write itself.

(Update: It appears upon further search the author's sister is indeed fictitious. An academic paper purportedly written by Doyle explicitly says he has no sister. This is repeated in an interview he did with The Irish Times commenting on Cameo, but that article is paywalled, so all I have is the snippet saying so from the result of Google search, "does rob doyle have a sister".)

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