Library books:
Missing Persons

This book, Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, was crazily hyped, but I don't have anything against crazily hyped books. Actually, I like reading crazily hyped books because I like to read about what I've read, and hardly anyone writes much about books that aren't crazily hyped. A vicious cycle, it is. So this book was fine -- superentertaining beginning, OK middle slog, weirdly but pleasantly drawn-out end. The voice was really amazing though, and it was told in first-person plural, which worked surprisingly well. I remember when everyone went crazy for Bright Lights Big City, which was written in second-person singular. It seems like that should have created a mania for the exploration of the other pronoun forms, but it didn't. I mean, first-person singular and third-person omniscient obviously constitute pretty much all literature, both Western and non-Western, from what I've read. If Jay McInerney laid claim to second-person singular, all there was left were first-person plural ("we") and second-person plural ("you"), though I think a novel written in only third-person plural ("they") as opposed to general third-person would be really startling. So Joshua Ferris took "we," which worked really well to express the Borglike (if I understand what Borgs are [what the Borg is?]) mentality of the advertising agency in which the novel was set. It wasn't just a brilliant conceit, it was well executed to boot. Now all we're really left with is second-person plural (and maybe third-person plural), though there might, of course, be superfamous books written in these forms (and I'm sure there are lots of experimental pieces), but I just don't know about them. It's funny to have the idea of a frontier be so tightly contained. I don't know about the remaining forms, though. "They" might be OK for a superparanoid sci-fi-ish sort of novel, but maybe it's just too irritating. I'm trying to think of the tone of a "you" plural novel. It's hard because you'd have to keep emphasizing that you mean "you" plural and not singular. Maybe it would best be written in the south, and it could be expressed as y'all. Fuck All Y'all, it could be called.