My Irritation with Current, Award-Winning BritLit


 


I think I've found the formula for winning the Orange Prize, the Booker, and whatever else book blurbers in the British publishing industry find impressive:

Introduce dysfunctional family. Good if through the eyes of disaffected spouse, better if through the eyes of a wise child.

Additional exposition re: dysfunctional family. Make sure everybody's got some serious warts/scabs. Pick until bloody.

Enter mysterious stranger.

Use mysterious stranger as the catalyst for various members of dysfunctional family to dabble in varying amounts of sex/drugs/whatever. Mysterious stranger will have odd, perceptive things to say - perhaps things they should realistically know nothing about (paranoia or magical realism? You be the judge, reader. I'm off to the pub for a pint).

Build tension with mysterious stranger until blowup occurs. Bonus points if you can ratchet each family member individually to a state of near-hysteria, total breakdown, or in the case of any adolescent in the household, freakish normality.

Follow dysfunctional family back to "regular life," or AMS (After Mysterious Stranger). Is family more enlightened or just more screwed up AMS? You be the judge, reader. I'm too tired to make it explicit, and as an added bonus: if I don't make myself clear at all, ever, irritating hipsters like Bookslut will find me all the more mysterious and alluring and lobby for my winning a major book prize.

Fin.

Now, if only I could stop throwing up long enough to write the damn thing. Oh, that's right. I'm not British.

Never mind.
Posted: Monday - September 18, 2006 at 06:22 PM         | |

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