8 /10 1 Votes
4.3/5 Barnes & Noble Publisher Thomas Dunne Books Pages 329 (1st edition) Country United States of America | 3.8/5 Goodreads Language English Publication date April 1998 Originally published April 1998 Page count 329 (1st edition) OCLC 39756403 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ISBN 0-312-19833-7 (1st edition) Genres Fiction, Satire, Black comedy Similar Daniel Handler books, Friendship books, Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Basic Eight is the debut novel by author Daniel Handler, published in 1998. The book is a version of the diary of high-schooler Flannery Culp. It contains a number of sarcastic plot devices that ridicule high school English classes, standardized testing, satanic panic and talk-show analysts. For example, Handler labels foreshadowing explicitly as such. Consistent with Handler's farcical treatment of 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.
Contents
The basic eight extended trailer
Plot
Flannery "Flan" Culp is a senior 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 narrative. She and her seven close friends refer to themselves as "The Basic Eight". They are an exclusive clique, hosting the Grand Opera Breakfast Club, and regular dinner and garden parties, as they cope with the stresses of their final year of high school. The plot begins in letters written by Flannery to her love interest, Adam, while on summer vacation, and reaches a dark conclusion in which lives of the members of the Basic Eight are turned upside down by revealed secrets, horrifying self-discoveries, and murder.
Title
The Basic Eight consists of:
Connections
In Handler's third novel, Adverbs, Kate is mentioned as the girlfriend to a minor character, Garth, in the chapter "Soundly". In The Basic Eight, Kate frequently gives relationship advice from her only, two-week relationship with Garth, much to Flannery's annoyance.
Origin
Daniel Handler is a graduate of Lowell High School in San Francisco 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.