Okay folks, Ella Minnow Pea is what is know as an lipogrammatic epistolary novel. All you English majors out there recall Pamela and Clarissa and probably hoped you would never have to open another volume with such a dated, forced style of writing. Developing a plot through letters, with only one-way dialogue, was a short lived, immature genre, becoming the subject of parody almost as soon as it became popular.
Playwright Mark Dunn, in this his first novel, has overlaid this story using the correspondence format with another layer of device, constraining his selection of words as the story advances by eliminating letter by letter until he is forced to write phonetically and in strained synonyms, with no ability to easily move across time by varying verb tenses.
Okay, none of the Slackers is now interested in reading this book; besides there is absolutely nothing about South Carolina in it, except that it is set on a fictional, independent island off the coast of Charleston. But it does strangely seem relevant as the world begins tweeting and dropping letters left and right. It also makes me remember all those horrible exercises Mercy Groupie had to do for her writers' class. I thought about writing this in Dunn's style, Dear Slackers, but if you carefully read through this review, you will find that the first three lost letters appear nowhere in this review. (Had to reread it and use a couple of synonyms myself.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment