Double or Nothing

Double or Nothing is a novel by the French-American writer Raymond Federman, published by Swallow Press of Chicago in 1971. It came out of the experimental writing of the period and won the Frances Steloff Prize and the Panache Experimental Fiction Prize.

The book is built of two narratives that run at once and interfere with each other. The first belongs to the narrator, a writer who decides to lock himself in a room for a year with a stock of food, toiletries and supplies, reasoning that deliberate isolation will generate the novel he cannot otherwise write. The text stays with him while he works out what he will need to survive the year, and drifts away from the book he is supposed to be drafting until what he has is a strategy for writing rather than a manuscript.

The second narrative is the novel he means to write. It follows a Jewish man who moves to America and meets a country unlike the one he left, and it will not hold still: as the first narrative grows, the second one changes with it, shifting its people and its events until the shape of the intended book survives only as a plan. Federman was a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the United States as a boy, and the doubled, unstable form of the book is the point rather than an ornament.