A lipogram is a literary work that puts a constraint on a writer. Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby, omits the letter "e", the most common letter in English. Aside from its novelty, Gadsby is a novel that stands very well on its own.
There isn't much I can tell you about this book. Gadsby was probably written sometime around the 1930s, as there is a reference to Wright writing the newspaper Evening Independent that he had written a masterful lipogram and that they should hold a contest with 250 dollars for the winner. They turned him down. Eventually Gadsby was published by a self-publishing vanity press in 1939 and the same year a warehouse that held most copies of the book burned down and Wright himself died. The book was never reviewed and to quote "only kept alive by the efforts of a few avant-garde French intellos and assorted connoisseurs of the odd, weird and zany.". The novels popularity in France actually surprised me doing research for this review. The French author Georges Perec, who will get to later, was inspired by the book to write A Void, his own lipogram omitting the letter "e".
Gadsby is an our town style novel that takes places in the fictional town of Branton Hills. John Gadsby is upset with the dying nature of his town and rallies an organization of youth to shape the town up into a thriving city. Through their efforts, through with some opposition to those who resist change, they succeed. Gadsby later runs for mayor and turns the population of Branton Hills from 2,000 to 60,000. It's a wholesome story, going through most of the early 1900s with World War 1, Prohibition, and Warren G. Harding's presidency. The strength of this novel shrines through with its prose. You would think that without the letter "e" there would not be anything Wright could do to enthrall you. Yet the prose is clean. There is never a single hiccup or stop, unless you count the odd moments where the narrator lampshades just how clever he's being, and clever he is. At one point in the novel a wedding is able to be described in full without using an "e" words that runs for several pages, and at another Gadsby describes a horse drawn fire engine without using any of those three words. The prose flows like a river, and it's a comforting sort, like listening to an older member of your family muse about the good ole days. Gadsby stands not only as a gimmick for its style but as a coherent, moving and simple story that becomes a window to the past, painting a charming and Arcadia esque quality picture of American life in the time period. As you watch the townspeople grow and marry and have children and watch Gadsby himself age into a tired but beloved old man with grandchildren of his own; you'll hardly realize you've read a 50,000 word novel without a single "e".
Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a few other novels and sadly I haven't been able to track them down to read them. Much of his life is unknown as he and his novels fade into obscurity but ever you have the itch for the odd, Gadsby is a masterpiece that should not only be known for its quirks, but it's heart. Since I lack the information to make this review the essasys I normally do, I leave you with the opening of the novel.
"If Youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn't constantly run across folks today who claim that "a child don't know anything." A child's brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adult's act, and figuring out its purport.
Up to about its primary school days a child thinks, naturally, only of play. But many a form of play contains disciplinary factors. "You can't do this," or "that puts you out," shows a child that it must think, practically, or fail. Now, if, throughout childhood, a brain has no opposition, it is plain that it will attain a position of "status quo," as with our ordinary animals. Man knows not why a cow, dog or lion was not born with a brain on a par with ours; why such animals cannot add, subtract, or obtain from books and schooling, that paramount position which Man holds today."
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