Some readers will recognize Handler’s sarcastic style reminiscent of his pseudonym Lemony Snicket from the children’s series A Series of Unfortunate Events, and I think that The Basic Eight, as his first novel, was where he tested out some of his stylistic techniques. The plot isn’t necessarily realistic, and the characters are larger than life, but I was completely hooked by The Basic Eight a few pages in and couldn’t get it out of my head. On the contrary, I found that the format lulled me into a false sense of security, and near the end of the book I actually slammed the book on the table and shouted, “WHAT?!?”. The fact that the novel’s major event is revealed straight away does not ruin the book’s momentum, either. What begins as a sharp satire of coming-of-age stories soon builds into a nightmarish storm of violence, wealth, and absurdity. Right from the novel’s beginning, we know that Flannery is in jail for killing a classmate, so the tension is carried by a truly magnificent cast of characters and a twisting plot. Their lifestyle, which starts out as merely decadent, soon spirals out of control when feelings of romantic betrayal seize control of our young narrator and she turns into a “murderess.” The story is told through Flannery’s edited diary entries, which she prefaces and annotates from jail, in order to produce her own version of events as she tries to win the public’s sympathy dispel rumors of satanic influence and paint herself as the literary heroine of her own perceived drama. Flannery Culp is part of a rather self-obsessed group of pretentious and creative friends – eight of them in total – who think that their dinner parties are the social events of a lifetime and who have a “Grand Opera Breakfast Club” which meets in the French classroom. The premise of The Basic Eight was exactly the sort of thing I love: a bitterly funny tale about the delusions of youth and shocking acts of violence, told with some really excellent narrative sarcasm. I know that July’s not over yet, but I’d venture to say that this was the top book of my month. And I really like books about young people behaving badly, so that’s saying quite a lot. In fact, I think it might be my favorite novel set in a high school of all time. The Basic Eight was definitely my favorite of the three high school books I read last week. I loved this book so much I took selfies with it.
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