i breezed right through the basic eight this week!
this first novel of daniel handler’s went largely unnoticed until he became lemony snicket and he started to hit his stride. with the release of his newest non-kiddy novel, adverbs, (which is also in my reading queue) his new publisher harper perennial reissued the book with blurbs like “author of ADVERBS” and even an excerpt from the new work in back.
the basic eight, however has been on my radar since before the lemony snicket days because 1) daniel handler went to my high school, and 2) this book was loosely based upon his own experiences there. i think “loosely” must be important in there, since the book is about a girl in jail giving her journaled account of the events leading up to the brutal murder of one of her classmates. short of a sex-change and a possible parole, i think “loosely” is very important.
when the book came out, i had a brief flurry of conversations with old classmates about the book, like, did you hear about this book? yeah, i hear some of the faculty at school is kind of upset about it.
and with good reason, since the depictions of faculty members, in the grand tradition of the teenage high school milieu, are rather villainous. but then again, the whole book is satire and caricature, told from the point of view of a fairly bitter and incarcerated (actually, fairly bitter and entirely incarcerated) teenage girl, flannery culp.
i had heard from others that the book wasn’t actually that good, so it was this knowledge of my high school i think, that kept me turning pages in the book, in particular the faculty members described. granted, daniel handler went to lowell a decade before me, but many of the teachers when i attended had been there for upwards of twenty or more years.
michael baker, calculus
i had mr. baker for accel math 1H freshman year, but i think he used to teach calculus before burning out. in general i liked him, but i nearly failed his class. once, i managed to argue a point on a test and turned my F into an F+.
michael baker is a well-meaning calculus teacher whose Baker’s Rule “do something” drives the action in the story and leads to disaster. i vaguely remember there actually being a baker’s rule, unless it’s the power of suggestion. i do, however, remember that the real mr. baker could draw fucking perfect circles on the board. freehand!
james carr, advanced bio
i never had mr. carmack, but he was the AP Bio teacher. i can’t vouch for any similarities between him and james carr in the book, but i certainly hope there aren’t any…
from what i remember, mr. carmack was relatively well liked, whereas james carr is an asshole who is continually sexually assaulting his teaching assistants.
johnny hand, choir
i never had mr. land either, but worked with him several times as stagecrew for school musicals. he was well-liked, i think, but regarded by students as somewhat of an eccentric.
johnny hand is a rarely present figure, an alcoholic, often leaving his class to be taught by a piano-playing teaching assistant. though it had never occurred to me that he might often be drunk, this actually rang very true of mr. land. i recall his classes often being run largely by his piano playing assistants.
ps. RIP mr. land!
there are some other theories out there that i’ve read, but many are about teachers and faculty that were long gone by the time i went there.
one that just occurred to me that i hadn’t seen anywhere was the possibility that the drama club teacher, ron piper, is loosely based upon mr. drain. (drain, piper? get it?) the gay part would be right, (i think…it was never confirmed, but he certainly was into frescos, and carried a tote bag, and took an interest in his male drama students) though i’m not sure he was considered as cool by the students as mr. piper was. i certainly would have never invited him to *my* cast parties.
all that aside, since i’m sure that none of this is very fascinating to anyone who didn’t attend my high school, onto my overall reaction to the book. it started off well, but hit a huge flat note at the end. what should have been an “omg i almost choked i’m so surprised, now i need to read the beginning over again” ended up being a “hold up hold up that don’t make no kind of sense.” without ruining the ending, suffice it to say that there is a twist at the end, but it doesn’t really line up with things that occur earlier in the book.
granted, the novel’s narrator is doubtlessly unreliable, as she even acknowledges in parts, so i don’t think that you’re supposed to understand what actually happened between her and this boy she murdered, but at the same time, for the ending to disconnect so severely from other parts of the book was so disconcerting and so off-putting, that after verifying that indeed what had just transpired did not really make sense, i put the book down and thought, that was it?
because you have to understand, i tore through this book. i started reading it on wednesday morning on the train and finished while at a dodger game on friday night. that’s how taken in i was by it. his writing is so charming and witty, and the book is so fast paced that i couldn’t help but think oh man, this is gonna be good, this is gonna be good! all the way into the last ten or so pages where my disappointment set in.
i mean, normally the great thing about a twist at the end is that 1) you don’t expect it and 2) it unexpectedly lines up perfectly with what had taken place earlier, like finding a magic lateral twist to solve a rubick’s cube. in this case, the twist just eradicated much of what had been built up in the book, particularly making certain conversations that took place completely nonsensical.
but again, there is the fantastically unreliable, but equally charming narrator, who is after all, editing the text from jail, and as she notes in places, she can place erroneous or skewed information in the text at will. at least she’s kind enough to impart us with that foreknowledge…
the pity is that i think with some reworking of the beginning of the book, the twist really could have worked, and it wouldn’t have necessarily been obvious that it was coming. handler’s writing is really super charming, and i can see how his eccentric use of language helped make lemony snicket a big phenomenon, but i can see why this novel was initially rejected by so many publishers before finding a home.
