I daresay you've never read a work of fiction like James Hoby's A Year With the Hoopers; I know I certainly haven't. For one thing, the book does not have a plot, certainly not in the traditional sense. In fact, there is no main character, no issue to be addressed, no real questions to be answered and no climactic moment toward the end.

Rather, what we have here are the detritus of a family, shredded, boxed up and -- for reasons unknown -- hurled out of a van onto the front lawn of the "author." Having recently acquired some decode-anything software, said "author" hires a couple of teenagers to scan all of the shredded documents into his computer and then let the software put all of the pieces together. The result: an eclectic mix of letters, memos, greeting cards, notes, school essays, etc.

While A Year With the Hoopers is a satirical -- and quite funny -- look at contemporary American life, it also raises questions about the interpretation of history and what kind of legacy we will leave behind for future individuals or even whole generations. After all, to some degree the very discipline of history revolves around assembling, piecing together and attempting an interpretation of the scattered, sometimes even discarded remains, left behind by a person, group or culture. One person's trash sometimes becomes a historian's treasure.

In the case of this novel, Hoby leaves the task of interpretation up to the reader, but the various bits of data assembled herein are the result of a pseudo-historical process of assembling scattered pieces of data that are seemingly meaningless and unintelligible in their original, shredded state and painstakingly (albeit by computer processing) piecing together and organizing them into distinct documents that can be translated and interpreted by others. To some, it's all discarded trash that means absolutely nothing; others may find it interesting but view it as insufficient information on which to draw a picture of the subjects in question. For a few, though, it may offer remarkable insight into a group of people -- and perhaps, vicariously, even themselves --we would otherwise know nothing about.

I think there is more than humor to be gleaned from these pages. Young Jenny Hooper's essays about her relationship with her parents and the problems of dealing with her old and infirm aunt offer insight into the teenaged psyche, and only a fool could fail to read a great deal between the lines of the constantly changing last wills and testaments emerging from the nursing home where Trudy Greathouse now finds herself contemplating her final days. Less informative, perhaps, but not to be missed are the increasingly fantastical letters written by one Xenophon Munny to Helen Hooper concerning a traffic accident he could not possibly have witnessed.

If nothing else, A Year With the Hoopers is a quick and quite comical read, so even those who find no point whatsoever for the novel's existence should at least be entertained to some degree. For some, though, the discarded history of this fictional modern family may hold surprising revelations.