What: In the subtitle, Mark Dunn's book describes itself as "A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable." This is entirely accurate, but perhaps a bit dense for an explanation. It's actually quite simple: More than a hundred years earlier, a man came up with a phrase that uses each of the letters of the alphabet: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." His hometown (a small fictional island) erects a statue in his honor, with the sentence on it. One day, the letter "Z" falls off the statue, the Council decides it's a Sign, and suddenly no one is allowed to use the letter "Z" anymore. Then the "Q" drops . . . then the "J" (you see where this is going). Oh, and the whole story is told through letters.
Comparable to: Kinda Kurt Vonnegut-ish. Also similar to the "fable for adults" tone of The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip.
Representative quote (from the first half of the book): "I must own that we were quite ataken by the Council's initial reaction to the incident, most of us regarding it as mere happenstance. The Council, on the other hand, sought with leapdash urgency to grasp sign and signal from the loss, and having offered themselves several possible explanations, retired with all dispatch to closed-door chambers for purposes of solemn debate and disposition."
Representative quote (from the second half of the book): "Pharewell. Pharewell. Tho we were not phrents 4 long, I will so miss ewe. Ewe are strong. It is goot that ewe are lepht."
You might not like it if: You don't believe the charm of the execution can outmaneuver the preciousness of the premise.
How to get it: Easy to get! The newer editions have a different subtitle, though: "A Novel in Letters."
Connection to previous Wreckage: The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip was Rec. #18.
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