I Read The Longest Lipograms So You Don't Have To (3 of 4)
Utopia and dystopia.
Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright.
Story: Fifty-year-old Gadsby and his youth movement turn his dying one-horse town around until it becomes a bustling metropolis.
Lipogram: No E.
Why a Lipogram?: The narrator says it’s just a tic of his, and he keeps apologizing for his style. Wright, the writer, claimed he was spurred to do it by everyone else thinking it was impossible. And that I-can-too, I’ll-show-you spirit of his leaks into the book’s spirited protagonist.
My Take: Hooray for progress! Start developing your town, everyone, and nothing can go wrong!
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On the one hand, the story is fairly preachy and predictable, with some attitudes we’ve long since outgrown informing its views on society. Still, Gadsby’s faith in the young to build a better world is still worth celebrating, and the idea of a society pulling itself out of blight is inspiring. And just the scope of the book resonates well with the far-reaching love for humanity that it portrays.
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This is one of the longest-ever lipograms, and inspired a lot of imitators, including Perec’s A Void. There’s a YouTube video (also a lipogram) about it below, which has the distinction of being the only filmed lipogram I could find anywhere.
No
eSchool by Douglas Evans.
Story: The No
eSchool principal decides to cut costs by banning the use of the letter “e,” which is also “banned” throughout the text. But is his policy really a cover-up for shadier doings? One student discovers a loophole that lets him expose the principal’s abuse of power, but then starts abusing power himself before course-correcting and lifting the ban.Lipogram: No e. (The name of the school has the “e” crossed out.)
Why a Lipogram?: As in a number of these works, the lipogram is the plot.
My Take: A silly story with some serious ideas behind it about power and the sometimes-arbitrary rules of those in power. The relatively low stakes of school politics keeps it from getting too heavy, though.
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The only strange part is that E is missing from the entire text, but the story includes a few pages before the ban goes into effect and a page or so after it’s lifted. The next book on this list is also about banning letters, but it only “bans” them in the text after they’ve been banned in the plot.
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.
Story: An island nation begins banning the use of letters as they randomly fall off its “THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG” monument, on pain of banishment or death.
Lipogram: First they come for Z, but no one uses Z much, so people work around it. (Buzz and Zeke change their names.) Then things escalate: no Q, no J, no D…eventually, standard spelling breaks down.
Why a Lipogram?: This is a simple allegory about free speech and how fascism encroaches on it, beginning with trivial inconveniences on its way to total control.
My Take: This was a tough one to rate. The story and the use of language are often genuinely great. But in the end, I was left more nonplussed than I wanted to be.
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The tone swings between 1984, with its banal and chilling tyranny, and “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,” with its nursery-rhyme, kid-safe code for tyranny. I wish it either had a darker ending or a lighter middle. The climax requires you to believe the tyrannical government will stop being tyrannical as long as the heroine can answer its wordplay challenge. Kind of like “What if Big Brother were also the Riddler?” Or maybe Orpheus’ Sphinx.
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And while I wouldn’t expect everyone to know the answer to that wordplay challenge, it’s a pretty well-known one if wordplay is your thing. So the kind of readers who’d appreciate this book the most spend a lot of time waiting for Ella to figure out what they already know.
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All those are reasons I don’t quite rank this one among the best lipograms, though it may be the most popular one with audiences today. I almost put it lower…but then I read a passage like the one below, and its startling power hits me again. Maybe I should be more forgiving of flaws when a story’s message is this sorely needed.
Ella Minnow Pea is in development as a movie at last report (2021).
Next: The best.
