Book #20: Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Someone at book club mentioned this book, so I immediately went home and put it on hold at the library. The subtitle of the book is "A progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable," and if you know what those words mean, it's a pretty good explanation of what the book is. A lipogram is a type of writing game where you try to write a full document while avoiding the use of certain letters--there are whole books written without using the letter E! (I find that wikipedia page really interesting.) So a "progressive lipogram" means that you start by taking out one letter, then another, then another, all the way through the alphabet.

The story goes that there's this island nation that semi-worships letters and the alphabet--or at least they place a very high value on words and letters. The man who invented the sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" was from there, so they built a statue with that sentence to honor him. One day, the Z falls off the statue, and the leaders of the island decree that it means that they are not allowed to use Z any more--all words that have Z in it are banned. Unfortunately, more and more letters continue to fall off the statue, so their language, which they've prized, becomes more and more constrained and lots of problems happen. The whole book is composed of letters between people on the island, so they have to follow the rules and write in lipograms.

I really like the idea for the story--it's cute and whatnot--but I feel like it kind of stretched my boundaries for belief a little bit. It went way too far--people being banished and killed for slipping up and using the banned letters twice? But besides that, I did not feel like the characters or the action was very well-developed at all. I've read epistolary novels before and really enjoyed them and felt like I connected with the characters, but not at all with this book. I understand that the point of the novel was to focus on the lipograms and not necessarily on the action, but there were way too many storylines and way too many people included in this book that I didn't believe or understand why they were there. For example, Ella, the main character, writes one time that she met a boy named Tom. A few pages later she gets a letter from Tom saying that he thinks she's pretty. Then he disappears and you don't hear anything more about him for the rest of the book when everything's resolved and she's apparently in love with him. What?! That was the dumbest love story ever! I think the whole lipogram idea would have been better served with a different and much less complex narrative around it.

Also, I didn't love how the whole novel basically seemed like a not-very-well-concealed analogy to religion and people blindly following edicts from leaders. It was wayyy to explicit for it to be useful and actually seemed kind of hostile to me. In short, this book sounded really neat, but it fell far short of my expectations and I don't think it was executed as well as it could have been.