Mark Dunn’s debut novel Ella Minnow Pea may be the first work of fiction ever composed through a process of deleting language from the page. Committing the cleverest of literary coups, the author eliminated nearly every letter of the alphabet from the story—a concept that sounds so preposterous, he says he spent two years trying to explain it to the folks in the publishing industry. In the end, the Memphis native’s act of narrative daring was richly rewarded; the ingenious, allegorical novel, which came out last year, was a surprise success, both a Book Sense of the Year Award Finalist and a Borders Original Voice Finalist.
The book is set on Nollopton, a fictional island off the coast of South Carolina named for Nevin Nollop, creator of the famous phrase, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”—a sentence that contains every character in the alphabet. As the mastermind behind this bit of linguistic hocus-pocus, Nollop is the object of godlike reverence on the island. When letters start falling off a statue erected in his honor, the town council drops them from the communal vocabulary; to speak, write or read them becomes a crime.
Luckily, the first letter to fall is “z,” perhaps the least essential to everyday discourse, but others quickly follow, stricken both from speech and from the novel itself. Soon the Nallopians are listening to music without lyrics and perusing picture books, and the overly earnest tape their mouths shut to keep from uttering censored symbols. All of which makes for a nightmare on the order of 1984 or Fahrenheit 451, only with less horror and more humor.
How Dunn himself makes do with a diminished supply of letters is something fiction lovers need to read to believe. Dunn, who delights in testing the boundaries of storytelling, has done so consistently as a playwright in New York, where he’s lived for the past 15 years with his wife Mary. His willingness to experiment has led him to construct unorthodox narratives for the stage as well as in novels, using devices like telephone conversations and journal entries as means of telling stories. Now playwright-in-residence at the New Jersey Repertory Company, he has scripted 25 works for the theater, although these days he prefers writing fiction.
“What I like about writing novels is the fact that the work is respected as a singular artistic creation,” Dunn says. “In my playwriting years, I liked the idea of presenting the play script and inviting artistic input and contributions from actors, the director, etc. But there is something even more delicious about writing fiction—perhaps even a little selfish. What is accomplished is pretty much yours.”
The author has been writing since he was a boy in Memphis, when he composed stories inspired by Jules Verne and The Twilight Zone (“anything in which the planet is imperiled by forces of total annihilation”). He grew up just a block away from Graceland and was close to his twin brother Clay. “Early existence for me was rather...shared,” he says, a fact that may explain why play-writing—the most cooperative of genres—originally appealed to him.
Dunn went on to study film at Memphis State University and screenwriting at the University of Texas, then moved to New York and began working in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division of the New York Public Library. Meanwhile, he was writing fiction and plays on the side. It was in the New York Public Library that he found a 1939 novel called Gadsby, a “lipogrammatic” masterpiece written without the letter “e” that planted the seeds for Ella Minnow Pea.
Although he describes himself as an “inveterate New Yorker,” Dunn draws deeply on his Southern heritage in his new novel, Welcome to Higby, an endearing comedy set in the early 1990s in northern Mississippi. With a dramatis personae consisting of 25 main characters and more than 80 supporting players—all quite unusual and all embroiled in five different plot lines—the book is a lesson in the cause-and-effect laws that seem to rule small communities. Whenever anything happens in Higby—and quite a bit does—the entire town ripples in response.
The large cast includes Bowmar, an ex-con with a heart of gold; Carmen, a lonely bachelorette who makes paintings from pasta and has heart-to-heart talks with her guardian angel; Stewie and Marci, a troubled couple always on the verge of breaking (or making) up; Talitha Leigh, a hell-raiser kidnapped by a Christian-vegetarian cult; and a depressed teen named Clint, who kicks the novel off by jumping from Higby’s water tower. All in all, they’re a surreal collective with enough personal tics to make Welcome to Higby seem like a Southern version of Twin Peaks, minus the sinister and forbidding qualities of that show.
“I’m probably a little biased in thinking that for Southerners those quirks are a little closer to the surface,” Dunn says. “I like to think that I was able to illuminate all those comical eccentricities that define us in a gentle, noncritical way. I hate that genre of Southern writing where the characters are depicted as cartoonish idiots, and I’ve vowed never to write a character like that.”
The events in the novel take place over Labor Day weekend, an action-packed 72 hours during which the citizens of Higby change one another’s lives in dramatic ways. The holiday is marked by a town picnic, a funeral and a storm that causes the collapse of the water tower, bringing full circle the events of a book that’s essentially about love and about letting go of the past. With minor characters like the bassoon-playing Hank Grammar, who insists on preaching the word of Christ to his neighbor’s pet cat, there’s never a dull moment in Welcome to Higby. “For these folks,” Dunn says, “the humor is organic to who they are and to their slightly off-kilter way of looking at the world.”
Mark Dunn appears in a panel discussion entitled “Seeing Yesterday Through Today—Novels,” noon-1:30 p.m. Oct. 13 in Conf. Room IA of the Main Public Library.
