Michael Chabon offers some suggestions in the Atlantic.
From the piece...
Why did you release Fountain City? And why now? By publishing it, even in fragmentary form, are you further investigating the theme of restoration (and loss)?
When I began annotating it, several years ago, I planned to go all the way through the thing, with the intention of figuring out, once and for all, what had gone wrong with it. I hoped that the experience might be useful not only for me but for millions of other failure enthusiasts and fans of ruination all around the world. Along the way, I began to see that the act of annotation promised to offer the opportunity to recover, not the novel—irrecoverable as ever—but traces and fragments of the life I had led while writing it. But then I faltered, got sidetracked, or rather maintracked, and, cleverly, found a whole new way to fail.
At some point during that time, I think I mentioned what I was trying to do to Dave Eggers. When the present editors of McSweeney's wanted to include a fragment of a novel in their "head," they came looking for me. I was a little hesitant, no more convinced than ever that anyone ought actually to read Fountain City. But in the end I decided that the annotations defaced the thing sufficiently to prevent anyone from thinking that I offered it with any kind of warranty of quality.
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