Through multiple narrators and interrelated, cyclical stories, Dave Godfrey's The New Ancestors introduces the reader to nonlinear processes of perception, to the idea that all telling modifies what is being told, and to the fact that what is told is always the telling. The juxtapositional quality of Godfrey's work has its roots in Henry James and Virginia Woolf, but is more closely aligned with the French nouveau roman as exemplified by Robbe-Grillet and a form of mythopoeia explicated by the structuralism of Roland Barthes and anthropological writings of Claude Levi-Strauss and Mircea Eliade. Godfrey suggests that by bringing the past to life through memory, archetype, and myth, humanity can find the stable patterns that will guide it in the present and provide a basic framework through which it can approach an uncertain future.
