Footnotes
If you go scroll down to "Galley Talk," you can read a nice review of An Abundance of Katherines here.
Katherines has also received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and The Horn Book.
If you're wondering why Katherines has not yet received any negative reviews, I have a theory: It takes longer to write negative reviews. As a book reviewer myself, I know what an exhausting process it can be to write a truly soul-crushing review. Should I call the author fat, or stupid? Should I refer to the subplot about the litle boy's love for giraffes as "unprecedentedly vapid" or just "rather phallic?" Is unprecedentedly even a word? These are just some of the questions that the writer of soul-crushing reviews must ask.
In other news, you have but eight days to complete your Contest entries.
And finally, I'm going to go on a rant about footnotes that's absolutely not required reading unless you are unusually interested in my crackpot theories about contemporary young adult literature.*
* E. Lockhart, a writer I admire a lot, sometimes uses footnotes in her book. And I use footnotes in An Abundance of Katherines, and so we have inevitably been compared to each other, which is a great joy to me, because I think she is fantastic. But it should be noted that there are--I'm estimating here--a total of about fourteen million writers who have used footnotes in their novels in the last, say, ten years. But for some reason, whenever a YA author uses footnotes, the beginnings of funny footnoting are traced not to E. Lockhart but to this guy. Now, I don't even know who Jonathan Stroud is to be perfectly honest with you, except that he is handsome and British. And I'm sure that his books are very good and everything, but I'm very curious how he came to be the originator of the idea of using footnotes in novels, since his first book came out in 1999, when the footnote had already become an ineradicable part of our literature.
The fact is that if you attend college, you end up spending quite a lot of time alone with footnotes, and you may eventually start to notice that footnotes are--consistently--the wittiest and most enjoyable parts of hefty texts. (For instance, I am a huge fan of the footnotes in a book called Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde, which incidentally is a fantastic book if you are into that kind of thing.) And so it is inevitable that the reasonably well-educated person falls in love with footnotes, and starts thinking about what footnotes could do and be. It's perfectly plausible to believe that all fourteen million writers who use footnotes in their books just came up with the idea independently when they noticed how footnotes can allow you to create a kind of secret second narrative, which is important if, say, you're writing a book about what a story is and whether stories are significant.
So you could very easily make the argument that it wasn't the handsome and British Jonathan Stroud who gave us our heavily footnoted contmemporary literature but rather all those academic texts we waded through as juniors in college. You COULD make that argument, but I think you'd be wrong. In fact, I do believe that we owe the contemporary footnote to the work of a single person; I just don't think it's Mr. Stroud.
I've had this crackpot theory for a long time that the real progenitor of many contemporary YA novels isn't Catcher in the Rye or A Separate Peace or Annie Get Your Gun or Forever or any of that, but instead David Foster Wallace's 1100 page (and massively footnoted) second novel Infinite Jest,. I know for a fact that E. and I have read IJ. Infinite Jest IS a coming-of-age story, or at least it contains a coming-of-age story, but I would never argue that it is itself a book for teenagers. It's just that literary young adult writers have adopted--whether directly or indirectly--a host of techniques from the book, including weird and largely inexplicable abbreviations (henceforeth WALIAs), a breathless narrative voice that isn't quite stream-of-consciousness, repetition of the word and, and footnotes. Infinite Jest is a major book, certainly, and it's been influential in the world of adult literature, too. But if you've read, say, 100 'literary' ya novels, and then you read Infinite Jest, I feel like it's hard not to be struck by how many of those 100 books owe something in some way to DFW that they would not otherwise have. So nothing against Mr. Stroud, but I think when we're talking WALIAs or footnotes, we have David Foster Wallace to thank (well, if thanks are to be given. I really believe that footnotes are pretty great if done well, and if you disagree with me then I hope we can have a fight about it in the comment section, which is basically the blog equivalent of footnotes).
7 Comments:
<< the blog equivalent of footnotes >>
right on - but waaaay cooler - like if you got to footnote the book without the librarian getting mad for writing in the books and then the author gets to read your footnotes and write back, "no actually, blah blah blah" its the awesomest part of blogs.
Interesting stuff, Mr. Green! And thanks for the compliments.
To be perfectly up front I have read a lot of David Foster Wallace's essays, but quailed, became flummoxed and failed in the face of Infinite Jest. I got bogged down in the tennis bits.*
You are right, otherwise, in your analysis of the origin of my footnotes. I haven't read Stroud and didn't know he used the things until last week when I read something that was probably the same thing you read about him being the origin of YA footnotes.
I get my love of footnotes from Wallace, a fantastically amusing Wodehouse article on the subject, and having suffered through a doctoral program in which all the most interesting bits of many, many books were in the notes, end- or foot-. I also spent three or four years teaching students how to write masters' level scholarly essays, going over footnote formatting ad nauseum, so it was great to have a little fun with them.
Bad Kitty by Michelle Jaffe has them and they are very amusingly used.
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*I am not anti-tennis, and in fact have taken actual tennis lessons, but am incapable of following long sporty bits in books, including passages about Quidditch.
Hi John,
I bribed Margo Lanagan to lend me her ARC of An Abundance of Katherines, and just wanted to let you know how much I loved it*. Although perhaps a bit embarrassed that after about 30 pages I had to go and google to see if Archduke Ferdinand really is in Tennassee...
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*especially the footnotes**. even the mathsy ones which may have given me a Rash.
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**I am also very fond of Jonathan Stroud's footnotes, but I am sure he'd be the first to admit he didn't invent the things.
I fell deeply in love with footnotes in college. Once I figured out how to use them correctly I couldn't seem to stop.* They fill me with happiness and are perhaps the single most wonderful thing I learned in college.
*I must admit that part of the desire to use them at the time was because they made papers longer thus helping me finish sooner.
Lili, you hopeless fangirl! But it was a very nice T-shirt.* And as you saw, it suited me. However, only John knows just how great I look in a golden-yellow bowling shirt. And he scrubs up quite well in one too - even when his face is a little green!
Katherines was so funny and good, I forgave you for the anagrams, John. :)
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*What she bribed me with.
I really liked your post, John, talking about footnotes. I wrote a blog post about the subject of footnotes recently, and I thought, based on my admittedly narrow reading habits, that Jonathan Stroud was responsible for starting the Footnotes Love Train. But now I'll have to give Infinite Jest a try, and not just for the footnotes, but for the tennis!
I think the origin of contemporary footnotes depends on the definition of contemporary and also on the genre that you're reading. Terry Pratchett, a contemporary british fantasist/satirist, wrote the first book in his Discworld series in 1983 and he uses extensive, hysterical footnotes.
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