Somewhere around 1969, I began to grow dissatisfied with the underlying principle of most novels - that a disembodied voice in the first or third person was telling us a story. I liked the idea of novels passing themselves off as documents and drew inspiration from Mark Harris's Wake Up, Stupid and Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife, the first, ostensibly a collection of letters, the second, duh, a diary. (One could, of course, go back further,...