As you probably know, I’ve just begun watching JJ Abrams’ television show Lost. The show is interesting on quite a few levels, mainly because it’s well-written and well-acted and just a good TV program. But it also has levels of mystery (and mysticism) behind it, and each episode and plot twist creates a ripple of fan involvement that borders on the obsessive. The show not only asks for fans to participate, it demands it — and for a person who’s always been interested in metafiction and textual experiments, this is highly interesting. I was thinking recently about a book that might be “Lost-like,” but really could not think of one. (Obviously, this is partly because literature does not hold the cultural currency television does.) The show borrows infinitely from literature, from its characters to its narrative tropes to its very ideas. But as for a book that contains so many unanswered questions, so many combinations of genres, so many mythical elements outside the text? I’m not aware of one.