So normally, I don’t like serialized fiction. More specifically I don’t care if something were serialized or not. I didn’t really ever like Stephen King’s The Green Mile, and when I read something from the 19th century like a Charles Dickens novel, I tend to try to read it in spite of how it was likely published and created.
But this novel, the form of being serialized is exactly what makes it interesting and appealing to me. Or rather, that adds a layer of complexity to the narrative and adds a layer of interest in thinking through the reading experience altogether.
So the novel, as it were, is a series of diary entries written by a kind of middle class manager in a business, who certainly has a moderate amount of success, but otherwise has nothing particularly, well, particular about him. He’s a middle aged man who is successfully married (he and his wife have a perfect alright marriage). He has some minor investments fall through here and there. He’s got friends who like him well enough. He makes really bad puns, and repeats them until everybody in the room gets a chance to hear them, with myriad success. He also has a bad son who wastes money, makes bad investments, and ropes everyone into his life.
He’s a buffoon, but not entirely a clown. Instead, he’s relatively normal and this book is neither a celebration or a condemnation of him.
But this is a really funny book. It’s funny because it’s weird and awkward and never tragic. It’s good because it’s like a sitcom in book form, and the serial format allows the book to better function as an almost television like series. This works because it was published in Punch in the 1890s.
(Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Nobody)
