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Oh, this is a wicked, wicked book. Wicked for its black humor, wicked for playing insidious mind games, and wicked for the way it sucks you in, building in intensity until the next thing you know it's 6 a.m. and you've been up all night reading. And then, when you get to the most wicked part of all, you want to read it all over again right away.
The Basic Eight is the 1999 debut novel from Daniel Handler, who is better known to the world at large as Lemony Snicket. The title refers to a clique of eight upper-middle class high school students, and the story is told from the point of view of one of them: Flannery Culp, a teenage girl with seemingly normal teenage-girl hangups, who (and this is not really a spoiler) becomes obsessed with a boy and eventually murders him. There's a bit of a narrative conceit going on as, in the "Introduction," Flannery explains that the writings to follow are her journal that she kept as the events of the book unfolded, which she is now editing after the fact. This creates some interesting temporal disjunctions and Möbius strips in the narrative, as the point of view shifts from the as-it-happens journal to after-the-fact asides and reflection. It also sets Flannery up as a possibly unreliable narrator, as some inconsistencies start to undermine her trustworthiness—a fact which she acknowledges flippantly. It's a short psychological distance from adolescent amorality to madness for Flannery, who obviously goes crazy at some point...but how crazy, and when? Handler leaves that a puzzle. There are some other interesting tricks going on too: nobody's parents are ever around, for instance, and the time setting is unclear due to thinly-disguised anachronistic pop culture references.
Handler also takes some sharp satirical jabs at things like pop psychology and true-crime sensationalism (characters appear, along with clueless, self-serving "experts," on the "Winnie Moprah" show, for example). The text is also peppered with vocabulary pointers (somewhat similar to the Snicket books) and "study questions," as though it were a school edition, except the questions are quite sassy and hilarious (and it's not clear whose point of view they are from).
This is a dazzlingly crafty, multi-layered book which pulls off the impressive feat of being intellectually stimulating and enormously entertaining at the same time. It's a deft and kaleidoscopic crossbreed of Heathers, River's Edge, and (highlight for big spoiler) Fight Club. Make sure you have a good, long, uninterrupted block of time before you pick this one up. (mike.09.05)
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