The Jamais Vu Papers
Or, Misadventures in the Worlds of Science, Myth, and Magic

Once upon a time in Los Angeles, an addled psychiatrist named Hector Glasco was vainly trying to treat a jaded celebrity named Hilary, who was suffering from a chronic and perhaps potentially fatal case of déjà vu—that condition, of course, in which one has the weirdest feeling that one has been here before. The cure, it seemed, was to instill a sense of jamais vu, a mysterious feeling that one has never been here before-not in this world, this life, or the most familiar circumstances.

On the advice of the celebrated neuroscientist Imogene Savonarola, Hector administered a drug called M to Hilary. M was the chemical equivalent of a metaphor, meant to act on the brain’s oxymorphins, the newly-discovered receptors for paradox. Put more simply, M was the most powerful placebo ever created. Hilary swallowed the capsule, then disappeared—and there began Hector Glasco’s mythic quest, for his missing patient, for self-understanding, and for the secrets of the universe itself.

The Jamais Vu Papers was our first novel—and our most unabashedly experimental one, which alternately infuriated and delighted its readers. “Seminally integrating illustrations and text,” as Publishers Weekly put it in a glowing review, Jamais Vu also included a bizarre cast: a secret society known as The Ancient Order of the Brothers and Sisters of Thaumaturgy, bent on a nefarious scheme to unite the worlds of waking and sleeping; the elderly ladies of The Elmblight, Ohio, Book Club and Sewing Circle, who in the course of reading The Jamais Vu Papers manage to become a part of the story, threatening to disrupt the fabric of reality; a cut-rate Venice Beach shaman named Bruno the Brujo; a demented deconstructionist scholar; the Cardiff Giant; and King Solomon himself.

Jamais Vu also includes a glittering cast of real-life guest stars who agreed to appear in the novel:

• author Tom Robbins, discussing time, history, and the pizza delivery zone
• physicist Fred Alan Wolf, grappling with an interdimensional entity named Llixgrijb who dreams our world into existence
• Yippie co-founder Paul Krassner, explaining the uses of “preventative journalism”
• poet Fred Chappell, whose answer to a question that nobody asks is, “Yes, do”
• literary agent John Brockman, who peremptorily refuses to represent Hector Glasco because he’s “just another psychiatrist with a book idea”
• cognitive philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, who explains how a fictional character can, indeed, achieve consciousness.

Other guest stars have, alas, left this earthly existence:

• the theatrical puppeteer and storyteller María De Cespedes, who turns out to be a puppet herself
• the critic and novelist Jamake Highwater, who warns that “We often end up munching on cardboard when we insist that we are dealing with reality”
• the famous neuronaut Timothy Leary, who serves as a garrulous tour guide to a distant cybernetic future.

 “Jamais Vu has the feel of an underground classic, but it's not, yet,” wrote an enthusiastic reader at Amazon.com. But we wonder—has our troubled book’s time come after all? The Jamais Vu Papers was published in 1991, then went out of print so fast that it made our heads spin. And yet, it now seems to be selling more copies than it did when it was actually in print—go figure!

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