Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A small country that is ruled by a single sentence and 26 letters. The people of Nollop revere the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" and its creator, Nevin Nollop. Letters begin to fall off a commemorative statue. The logical explanation? The quasi-divine Nollop is speaking from beyond the grave, telling his people to omit the use of those letters from all discourse, spoken or written. The fundamentalist-minded happily take to the new edicts, ratting out those who slip up or intentionally break the law; the well-paid police force happily enforce the rules of the dictatorial High Council; most people grumble but follow the rules, too afraid to challenge the powers-that-be; and, while others flee or are banished en masse, a few brave souls attempt to compose a new sentence, to prove that neither Nollop nor his sentence have any special power.

Dunn's humorous but pointed satire is what he calls a "Novel in Letters" -- it is both epistolary and concerned with the literal letters of the alphabet. The pun on "letters" as both missive and the building blocks of communication making the point of how crucial even the tiniest components are to how we express ourselves and understand the world around us: without a letter, we suddenly lose a whole world of communication. As the letters disappear from Nollop, so too do they disappear from the letters that make up the novel (except for a few moments that are explained as slip-ups and subsequently "punished" by the authorities). As the 26 letters become 25, then 24, then 23, discourse becomes both more crude and more unstable: without agreed upon words to express certain concepts (how do you say what day it is when the letter "D" is banned?) vocabulary becomes increasingly unstable, and communication becomes more difficult. Ironically, the greater control exercised over discourse the more it becomes uncontrollable -- both by the authorities and those who try to connect with others. Ultimately, though, it is the very instability of language -- and the fact that no one person owns it -- that exceeds tyrannical authority and returns the ability to discourse fully back to the people.

I wouldn't call this book a linguistic tour de force or anything, but it is very clever and fun. Mark Dunn is no James Joyce, but he has a lot of fun with words and is clearly a versatile and impressive wordsmith. How he planned the narrative I don't know -- how to decide which letters disappear and in which order, yet still be able to tell the story you want to tell? It is quite impressive, and for those who enjoy the playfulness of language and neologistic humor, the book is perfect. It's satire on fundamentalism, overreaching authority, and the complacency of the public is quite apt as well, and very pointed. The book itself is a quick read -- I finished it in 2 hours while doing a few other tasks -- but worth seeking out.

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