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A review by mattlefevers
The Basic Eight by Daniel Handler
2.0
Fight Club ruined a lot of books for me.
I found The Basic Eight on a list of postmodern books, or maybe a list of unreliable narrators, I'm not sure. I have read Daniel Handler's Why We Broke Up (really liked it) and the first Lemony Snicket book (liked it well enough) so this seemed like a no-brainer for me. Books with odd narrative structures, meta-textual tricks, or postmodern narrators are what I live for.
I was surprised how hard this one was for me to get into. The format is great -- the entire story is framed as a high school journal that is being typed up (and heavily edited) in the modern day by its author, the now 20-year-old Flannery Culp. In a parody of high school English courses, each chapter ends with three or four study group questions and a list of vocabulary words, many of which I'm pretty sure are nowhere in their corresponding chapters. The tone of the study questions was reminiscent of GLaDOS from the Portal games, sort of formal and businesslike with a layer of malice and sarcasm hiding underneath. The framing device of having the diary entries written in real time but the editorial comments written later gives an extremely unreliable tone to the story, as Flannery inserts foreshadowing into the narration and sometimes even ends a story by confessing that it never happened, or not quite like that. These slippery twists and turns are what I loved about the book, and what kept me turning pages.
The characters and story, however, I'm not so sure of. Flannery is supremely unlikeable, and most of her friends and love interests are no better. I don't demand that my fictional characters be super nice (I love Arrested Development and plenty of other fiction where there is hardly any clear person to root for) but the Basic Eight (her clique) are not as clever as they think they are, and not as interesting as I'd like them to be. The story amounts to little more than high school drama, with a revolving door of will-they-won't-they couples that I didn't really care about because they were all so selfishly obtuse. The tension climaxes in a long, surreal chapter at a party that is written in such fractured stream-of-consciousness that it made *me* feel drunk reading it. This ending is a testament to Handler's writing skill -- the loopy, distracted narration is perfect for conveying a drunken mental breakdown -- but as it dragged on I lost patience with the suspense, turning page after page after page waiting for the twists to click into place in the satisfying way I was sure he was building up to.
***SPOILERS AHEAD***
And here is where Fight Club comes in. In the same way that M. Night Shyamalan is the last person who will ever be able to pull off the "he was a ghost" twist, everything I have read or watched since Fight Club has failed at surprising me with an imaginary character twist. It's not the author's fault -- in this case, Basic Eight was written only a year or two after Fight Club and well before Secret Window and many others -- but I puzzled out the answer about halfway through the book, and the remaining half was an irritating wait for the story to catch up. I was very let down to discover in the last few pages that Handler had no more tricks up his sleeve, and the only surprise was the one he had telegraphed pretty early. The thing with an unreliable narrator is that when you figure out their game, the rest of the story should reveal itself in retrospect, and I feel like there are still plenty of mysteries and questions that the ending never explains. You never want to end a book with a feeling of frustration welling up in you, an aggravated "really? that's it?" your only response, and that's where this left me.
I found The Basic Eight on a list of postmodern books, or maybe a list of unreliable narrators, I'm not sure. I have read Daniel Handler's Why We Broke Up (really liked it) and the first Lemony Snicket book (liked it well enough) so this seemed like a no-brainer for me. Books with odd narrative structures, meta-textual tricks, or postmodern narrators are what I live for.
I was surprised how hard this one was for me to get into. The format is great -- the entire story is framed as a high school journal that is being typed up (and heavily edited) in the modern day by its author, the now 20-year-old Flannery Culp. In a parody of high school English courses, each chapter ends with three or four study group questions and a list of vocabulary words, many of which I'm pretty sure are nowhere in their corresponding chapters. The tone of the study questions was reminiscent of GLaDOS from the Portal games, sort of formal and businesslike with a layer of malice and sarcasm hiding underneath. The framing device of having the diary entries written in real time but the editorial comments written later gives an extremely unreliable tone to the story, as Flannery inserts foreshadowing into the narration and sometimes even ends a story by confessing that it never happened, or not quite like that. These slippery twists and turns are what I loved about the book, and what kept me turning pages.
The characters and story, however, I'm not so sure of. Flannery is supremely unlikeable, and most of her friends and love interests are no better. I don't demand that my fictional characters be super nice (I love Arrested Development and plenty of other fiction where there is hardly any clear person to root for) but the Basic Eight (her clique) are not as clever as they think they are, and not as interesting as I'd like them to be. The story amounts to little more than high school drama, with a revolving door of will-they-won't-they couples that I didn't really care about because they were all so selfishly obtuse. The tension climaxes in a long, surreal chapter at a party that is written in such fractured stream-of-consciousness that it made *me* feel drunk reading it. This ending is a testament to Handler's writing skill -- the loopy, distracted narration is perfect for conveying a drunken mental breakdown -- but as it dragged on I lost patience with the suspense, turning page after page after page waiting for the twists to click into place in the satisfying way I was sure he was building up to.
***SPOILERS AHEAD***
And here is where Fight Club comes in. In the same way that M. Night Shyamalan is the last person who will ever be able to pull off the "he was a ghost" twist, everything I have read or watched since Fight Club has failed at surprising me with an imaginary character twist. It's not the author's fault -- in this case, Basic Eight was written only a year or two after Fight Club and well before Secret Window and many others -- but I puzzled out the answer about halfway through the book, and the remaining half was an irritating wait for the story to catch up. I was very let down to discover in the last few pages that Handler had no more tricks up his sleeve, and the only surprise was the one he had telegraphed pretty early. The thing with an unreliable narrator is that when you figure out their game, the rest of the story should reveal itself in retrospect, and I feel like there are still plenty of mysteries and questions that the ending never explains. You never want to end a book with a feeling of frustration welling up in you, an aggravated "really? that's it?" your only response, and that's where this left me.