Harington is the topographer of an arcadian neverworld, a kind of hillbilly Macondo (Gabriel García Marquez is a major influence) inhabited by several prominent families of the Stay Morons who appear in most of his novels. "All of the worlds of my 'fiction' are invented, pastoralized, idealized, fictionalized, that is, made into art as opposed to 'life,' which is pretty dull stuff," Harington observed in a 1994 interview. The author himself, in various disguises or personae, also appears with regularity, for he is mediator between this comic, pastoral, romantic locus and the outside world of the reader. Harington has explained his "appearances" as being an aid to the reader: "If the reader can believe that the author himself was involved in the story, that diminishes the reader's own distance from the story.... To the extent that characters appearing in my books are based on me or offer allusions to me -- they are presented as objectively as possible, as if I were writing from a psychic distance about a character not myself. The 'Harington personae' ... are usually depicted as comic characters, seen with a sense of humor that one would not ordinarily be able to apply to oneself."
In the tradition of such serious novelistic jokesters as Vladimir Nabokov and García Marquez, Harington requires that his readers join him in the telling of his stories: "In my effort to make the reader a participant in the creation of the imaginary world of 'reality,' I choose narrative techniques which require the reader not only to figure out the stories but also to investigate, usually with the benefit of a second or third reading, the multiple levels of 'existence,' meaning, allusion, 'reality.' ...
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