The screenwriter didn’t write it.
It comes from nowhere. It’s a chaintext that people were sending each other in the days before Christmas. This was how the world talked to itself.
And by any measurable standard, it’s much more interesting than reading a book.
Despite the notions thrown about whenever a prestigious novelist gives birth to another tedious narrative bound in paper, the actual function of novels in American society was very different than anyone liked to admit.
Yes, reader, you could shit in some high cotton and talk to your friends about how reading ennobled the human spirit, and how literature connected people to one another, and how the whole enterprise promoted a humanistic understanding of Life in Our Time.
But then, of course, you would be no different from the Xanax-addled Brooklynites who earn small amounts of money by writing crap articles critiquing the implicit racial and gender politics of television dramas about werewolves and vampires.
And, reader, you are many things.
Some good, some bad.
But you’re better than the children who pretend, for money, that they’re upset about the latest episode of Supernatural.
You’re not that kind of liar.
I can think of one reason why I can’t escape comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut.
And it ain’t because my work is so indebted to his own.
It’s because Vonnegut was the same as me: another con artist ripping off the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
A bunch of people have talked shit about Céline.
I don’t blame them!
Besides being one of the best writers of the Twentieth Century AD, he was also a rabid anti-Semite who collaborated with the Nazis.
But I can’t judge!
I too have collaborated with Nazis!
I was published by Penguin Random House!
But the real reason why I can’t escape the Vonnegut comparisons is not because our books are rip-offs of the same anti-Semite, but rather that the entire conception of the Serious Novel is a hideous stew of baked-in prejudices.
These prejudices are so omnipresent that they’re invisible.
Whenever someone writes a work of incandescent prose about privileged people whose artistic, cultural, and familial foibles result in a plot-and-character-driven catharsis, no one goes on Goodreads.com and accuses them of ripping off Henry James.
But they should!
All of that crap, all of the good writing, the well-structured paragraphs, the emphasis on plot, the unexpected quirks of prose, the pretend lives of pretend people which resolve into a reflection of Our Time and Our Selves!
It’s all technique!
Henry James was doing that shit before your parents were fertilized zygotes!
It’s older than old hat.
Ancient technology!
And that’s how we’ve defined the Serious Novel.
By pretending that technique from the Nineteenth Century AD can encompass the horror of the Twenty-First Century AD.
And because of that definition, most Serious Novels are so fucking boring that they have zero hope of competing with smartphones. Imagine a very cranky human being who, while riding public transit, gets upset when they witness other people using smartphones.
“No one reads anymore,” laments the very cranky human being. “Look at all these kids using smartphones!”
And you nod your head in agreement, don’t you, reader?
You think it’s ever such a shame that the public is no longer willing to engage with long tedious narratives bound in paper. How terrible you find it that smartphones have killed literacy!
You agree with that crank!
But the problem isn’t the smartphone!
It isn’t the people using their smartphones!
It’s that books got defined down!
There’s one working standard for judging quality!
Is this tedious narrative bound in paper less boring than watching peoples’ slack faces as they ride a crosstown bus?
I don’t blame anyone for using a smartphone to alleviate boredom while riding public transit. I know that pictographic messages about sexual encounters with Santa Claus are slightly less boring than reading novels about Life in Our Time.
So, no, reader, I’m not like that crank.
I don’t blame anyone for getting addicted to their smartphones.
I only blame people for their terrible attempts at reviewing my work.
Vonnegut, Vonnegut, Vonnegut!
He invented the short sentence!
He invented the short paragraph!
He invented jokes!
Chapter Four
Child, Be Strange
Before going to Los Angeles, Celia had left Fairy Land on one previous occasion.
This was when she went to the city of London on the island of Great Britain.
She traveled in the Year of the Sulky Octopus, which roughly corresponded to 1608 AD, 1017 AH, and 5369 AM.
Celia had arrived in the middle of the Little Ice Age, which was a long period of freezing winters and terrible cold.
Celia went to London a few days after Christmas, which was a holiday that celebrated the birth of an itinerant preacher from Galilee who’d promulgated an ideology of love, non-violence, and forgiveness.
Somehow this ideology of love and forgiveness, which was called Christianity, had been transformed into a religion responsible for tens of millions of deaths.
History is so fucking weird.
More Vonnegut!
He invented Jesus!
Prior to Celia’s first departure, Fern had returned with news from a peregrination abroad: Tom a Lincoln, the book by Richard Johnson, had been adapted into a play.
“A play?” asked Celia. “Whatever is a play?”
“Some people are chosen to embody roles around a theme. The chosen people speak words as if they themselves were their embodied roles.”
“You say that they have made a play of my life?” asked Celia.
“Yes,” said Fern.
“Someone will speak as me?” asked Celia.
“Yes,” said Fern.
“I must attend,” said Celia.
Fern could not go to England with her mother.
She’d been away from Fairy Land for about a year.
Whenever Fern returned from a vacation, she’d stay on Fairy Land for at least two years, which was long enough to chase away even the slightest hint of the island’s collective depression.
One of Fairy Land’s more aggressive women was drafted into service as Celia’s escort.
Her name was Rose Byrne.
When the women of Fairy Land had banished or murdered all of the island’s men, Rose had been one of the more violent and vocal agitators.
Rose had argued against banishment. She wanted to kill all the men.
She hadn’t killed all the men, but she had murdered more men than anyone else on the island.
She’d cut off their heads.
She’d hung them from gibbets.
She’d boiled them in oil.
She’d drowned them in ale.
She’d crushed them with rocks.
She’d buried them in sand, covered their heads with honey, and let their skulls be picked clean by ants.
About two centuries before Fern first left the island, Rose began taking her own trips away from Fairy Land.
Rose’s trips abroad were very short affairs.
She only left long enough to sail a skiff to a distant land, get blotto stinking drunk, and then brutalize unsuspecting men in dirty taverns.
But the violence tourism had taught Rose how to travel, which made her useful as Celia’s companion.