The Basic Eight
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| The Basic Eight | |
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| Author | Daniel Handler |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Fiction, Satire, Black Comedy |
| Publisher | Thomas Dunne Books |
| Publication date | April 1998 |
| Pages | 329 (1st edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-312-19833-7(1st edition) |
The Basic Eight is a novel by Daniel Handler. Flannery Culp is a senior (12th grader) at Roewer High School in San Francisco. Over the course of the year, 'Flan' records the events of her life in a diary - which, after some heavy editing by Flannery herself, some years after the fact, becomes the of the narrative. She and her seven close friends refer to themselves as "The Basic Eight," and the eight teens regularly hold formal dinners to relieve themselves from the stresses of high school. After Flan writes love letters to her interest while on summer vacation, the lives of the members of the Basic Eight are turned upside down by revealed secrets, horrifying self-discoveries, and murder.
The Basic Eight is full of sarcastic plot devices that poke fun at high school English classes and standardized testing. For example, Handler labels foreshadowing explicitly as such. In addition to creating a farce on high school English, he includes vocabulary words and study questions at the end of some of Culp's diary entries. During the school year in which the book takes place, Flan appears in the high school production Othello, and compares her life to that of the characters in the play.
Daniel Handler is a graduate of Lowell High School and The Basic Eight is supposedly loosely based on his high school experience. Many of the teachers portrayed in the book are thought to be based on (and have very similar names to) Lowell faculty members from Handler's high school years. Some of these teachers continue to work at Lowell. In addition, many of the locations used in the book, such as Lake Merced, are in their unedited forms and actually exist near Lowell High School.
Handler's style of writing, along with the form of the story itself, loosely relates (although not directly) to Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece Lolita. The narrators are both incredibly unreliable (Flannery herself admits to this several times throughout the book, in another example of Handler's tongue-in-cheek humor), and there is a highly stylized writing style, with frequent puns and wordplay.
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