In a letter to Charles Olson on June 5, 1950, the late Robert Creeley wrote that "form is never more than an extension of content." In her "How To Write" published in 1931, Gertrude Stein claimed "Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are." These two exclamations of style, made in the first half of the 20th century, make problematic any contemporary so-called "experimental" fiction.
David Hoenigman's book is manifestly "new," anti-narrative, and anti-dialogue (Robert Grenier's "I HATE SPEECH," 1971, springs to mind). "Burn Your Belongings" presses all the right buttons to be branded experimental or modern — and that is the key word: "modern."
The action of the "novel" takes place in a nameless city, peopled with nameless characters. However, the city is obviously Tokyo and the characters are the I, she, he of a postmodern menage a trois. This is an avant-garde autobiography, written in minimalist sentences, each page containing the space of a paragraph. If I take a passage at random, the style will become apparent: