“When you get The Unfortunates, what you get is a box.
Inside the box, 28 pamphlets.
One is an introduction, one is labeled First, another is labeled Last, and the rest have symbols at the top with no prescribed order.
The idea is that you read First first, Last last, and then others can go in any order.
The basics of the plot: a sportswriter is in a smallish town to cover a soccer game, and once he arrives, he realizes the town is one where a friend spent the final years (maybe months) of his life while being killed by cancer.
Each pamphlet, then, is a memory or something happening in the present, sometimes a mixture. Lots of the memories are about the narrator’s friend, some about the narrator’s love life, some about eating lunch.
And the whole concept of putting it together this way is that it replicates how memory works: things don’t have a nice, linear flow. Instead, we remember things as we go. Sometimes those memories seem related to what we’re seeing, sometimes not.
I get a little fartsy here:
This really worked for me. It made me think about the way books are put together, that the author makes things as linear as possible, forms memories or ideas into a story by creating that throughline, but The Unfortunates still creates a story and a strong sense of emotion without a”this happened, then this happened” kind of structure.
It’s not something that’d always work, not something everyone could pull off, but B.S. Johnson makes it work, and it’s one of the cases where the gimmick enriches the story instead of taking away for it or trying to be the story’s entirety.
If you’re into experimental narratives, on some level, this is a great read. It works as an experiment, and it works as a book. It hit me on a “the feels” level even though there was a little bit of a barrier, a learning curve.
Learning that Johnson committed suicide not too long after writing this…
Well, damn, I feel like there’s something about it I get.
I think Johnson was really trying to express something in his books, something about what it’s like to be inside his head. And while his Wikipedia (and other sources) say that his death had some to do with his lack of commercial success, I can’t help but feel like “lack of commercial success” takes on a deeper meaning when part of why you’re writing is to be understood.
It’s probably common among writers, to make something in order to express what things are like inside their heads. But I think Johnson went an extra distance to replicate that experience in new and different ways, and that’d probably make it all the more painful when he didn’t reach a wider audience.
Because “not reaching a wider audience” probably felt like, “not being understood.””