Rick Moody isn’t the first writer to twitter a story, but he is the first (and surely the most famous) to craft one specifically for the medium, according to the editors of Electric Literature, where his work appeared last week. His chronicle of what used to be called a May/December romance (now a reverse Cougar?) unfolded throughout the day last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, describing a directionless middle aged would-be philosopher and the shapely textaholic he meets through an online dating service.

Predictably, reaction to Moody’s experiment hasn’t addressed its literary value at all: readers can’t see the story for the tweets. Whether you followed “Some Contemporary Characters” burst by burst or read it in its entirety, bottom to top, later, it was a dyspeptic experience. Some of my grad students delighted in the way Moody gave new meaning to intertextuality: the narrative seesaws between the voices of the two characters, one of whom is texting her thoughts to a friend.

Others liked the withholding aspect of the delivery—waiting for the next burst made the whole thing more tantalizing, they said, in the same way that awaiting the next season of “Madmen” only enhances its mystique. But a ten minute break between tweets is a lot different from days or months between episodes or seasons (or chapters) that have developed within their discrete installments, and the format requires way too much puritan restraint for my literary libido.

As a reader on Replacement Blog noted:

Initially, the medium seemed tyrannical—for some reason I wanted to be present for each update, to read each new tweet as it came across my screen, difficult when you’re at work and have meetings all day, like I do. Eventually, though, I discovered that reading each new installment in isolation was diminishing my enjoyment…I constantly had to go back to previous tweets to remind myself of what was happening in the story.

Content posed an even bigger problem. The story itself is, well, tweedy in itself-consciousness. The style is spotty—some tweets are abbreviated and slangy, others are composed and strangely mannered–possibly, I considered, in a deliberate attempt to show the philosopher’s hopeless old-fartism and inability to adapt. (Note to self at dawn:,” he writes, “S. Spielrein recognized the destructive essence of longing, an idea she passed on, like an STD, to Freud and Jung.”)

But the hipster girlfriend’s comments made me wonder if Moody just wanted me to hate these people equally: “On the train I told him that I was pierced, I was tattooed, I was tribal, I loved whatever way I wanted to, and that was my revolution.”

This medium is merciless on a bad passage: First it’s framed in silence, then it’s yanked out of context, then it’s blasted across the internet, then ten minutes pass during which the reader reflects in tranquility on the confounding awfulness of a sequence like this:

“We twisted around some way so I was on top. For a while. He couldn’t crush me. I could feel his complications in the dim light.”

It gets worse (when they kiss, she tastes like “the middle class”) before it gets better (Moody pulls off a clever structural twist at the end, where social media becomes a hall of mirrors for the relationship.) But the story is never satisfying, twittered or not, because the characters are too busy modeling generational types, and the Nation-reading, Hegel-invoking old relic, as Moody paints him, would probably never get on Facebook in the first place, which is where the story ends.

Rightly worried about the state of publishing, the editors of Electric Literature are making a noble effort to save fiction through digital platforms including Iphones, ebooks, and audiobooks. They’ve invited responses to Moody’s experiment on their Facebook page, and they’re genuinely committed to promoting new work. But their remedy for this endangered art calls its very integrity into question: their web site features charmingly animated video interpretations of selected sentences from random stories, which implies some basic inadequacy on the part of literature itself, and confuses rethinking its distribution with repackaging it altogether. Lydia Millet, for one, doesn’t need extras.

And here’s the rub: Electric Literature is also a smart looking, fine quality, print-on-demand magazine. Throughout the week, it lay on my nightstand calling to me while Moody’s story stuttered across the internet. So I ended up following “Some Contemporary Characters” by day, fighting a case of simmering resentment. At night, I read Electric Literature in bed, devouring, for starters, the truly marvelous Marisa Silver, pages at a time. I did it in the dim light, where I could no longer feel Moody’s complications.