The uber-narrator

I'm reading T.C. Boyle's story, A Death at (some weird place name I can't remember, somewhere on Long Island?) in this week's New Yorker, haven't finished, but it's a good story, like just about everything he writes, short stories especially. I know he has his fans, but he may be underappreciated because he's so prolific : 8 books of stories and counting, plus a dozen novels. Anyway, this one seems very good, and he tries something with the narration that I've never seen before. He tells the story, about interactions among some families, mostly Jewish, in a lakeside community, in the mid-70s, over the course of a few months I think - time and place a little foggy, but maybe I was reading inattentively, not clear if it's a summer resort or, as seems more likely as story unfolds, a yearround community on a lake. Anyway, about every 20 paras or so Boyle breaks into the narrative with a bracketed para or two in smaller type. These passages are first-person commentary on the characters in the story, from the POV of a minor character, who may or may not appear on the periphery of the narrated events (one of the other kids in the neighborhood, a friend of some of the teenage guys in the story) - the sense being that the brackted passages are Boyle's own comments on the events of the story, which creates the weird illusion that the story itself is not his. With this technique, he can tell the story in two ways, or two strands/dimensions, and both own and disown it at the same time. It's a little like the first-person plural that others have used to recollect communal events from their you: Alice McDermott, Jeffrey Eugenides. Here, though, in a more daring form, though only for the breadth of a story. Hard to bring off at greater length, though Nabokov did, for a very different effect (Pale Fire).