The Basic Eight [Hardcover]

Daniel Handler (Author), Handler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1999

It's first semester senior year, and Flannery Culp needs her friends more than ever. Her homeroom teacher is a tyrant, her biology teacher is a pervert, and in a few months the Winnie Moprah Show will broadcast vicious lies calling her a Satanic murderer when they really mean murderess. Flan needs Kate, even though she gossips incessantly. She needs Gabriel, even though he has a scarcely requited crush on her. She needs V_____, whose name has been changed to protect her wealthy family. She needs Douglas, who can get absinthe. She needs Lily, she needs Jennifer Rose Milton, but most of all she needs Natasha--beautiful, brave Natasha--who is turning her calculus teacher's advice--do something--into a formula for panache. Flannery needs all of the Basic Eight, because high school can get so stressful, you just want to kill someone.

Vocabulary:

TYRANT

INCESSANTLY

SCARCELY REQUITED

PANACHE

Study Questions:

1. In order to sell, a work of literature now has to be condensed into a few pithy paragraphs on the front flap. Does this seem right to you? Why or why not?

2. Really, the only way to tell if a book is any good is to purchase it for yourself, take it home, and read it all the way through. Don't you think? Why or why not?

3. If a boy is messing with your head, is it okay to pummel his head? Why or why not?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Flannery Culp is 19, precocious, pretentiousAand incarcerated. Accused of Satanism and convicted of murder, she and her seven friends (the "Basic Eight") have been reviled and misunderstood on the Winnie Moprah Show and similar tabloid venues. So Flannery has typed up and annotated the journals of her high school years in order to tell her real story: "Perhaps they'll look at my name under the introduction with disdain, expecting apologies or pleas for pity. I have none here." Handler's sharply observed, mischievous first novel consists of Flannery's diaries from the beginning of her senior year to the Halloween murder of Adam State and its aftermath. The journals detail Flan's life in her clique of upper-middle-class San Francisco school friends, who desperately emulate adulthood by throwing dinner parties and carrying liquor flasks. Kate ("the Queen Bee"), Natasha ("less like a high school student and more like an actress playing a high school student on TV"), Gabriel ("the kindest boy in the world" and in love with Flan) and the rest begin experimenting with the hallucinogen absinthe. Squabbles once easily resolved grow deeper and darker when Natasha poisons the biology teacher who has been tormenting Flan. Should the Basic Eight turn on, and turn in, one of their own? Handler deftly keeps the mood light even as the plot careens forward, and as FlanAnever a reliable narratorAbecomes increasingly unhinged. The links between teen social life, tabloid culture and serious violence have been explored and exploited before, but Handler, and Flannery, know that. If they're not the first to use such material, they may well be the coolest. Handler's confident satire is not only cheeky but packed with downright lovable characters whose youthful misadventures keep the novel neatly balanced between absurdity and poignancy. (Apr.) FYI: The Basic Eight has been optioned for film by Bridget Johnson, producer of the hit film As Good As It Gets. Handler's second novel, Watch Your Mouth, will be published by St. Martin's in winter 2000.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

First novelist Handler has all the teenage issues down patAbelonging, power, loyalty, drugs, and body imageAas he sets about proving just how dangerous high school can be. As Flannery Culp edits her journal of the previous year in prison, we follow Flan and her friends (the Basic Eight) through the fall of their senior year. Adults are generally absent, except for a few teachers who matter. Flan's beautiful friend, Natasha, is worth close attention. Handler's writing is witty and perceptive, especially as schools and society are parodied, and he makes clever use of vocabulary and study questions. But as a brutal murder unfolds and lives are ruined, the "wonderful, wicked fun" promised by the book jacket faded for this reviewer. The novel has been optioned for film, so expect to see it on the screen, a tragedy larger than the Othello Flan's drama club is staging. Recommended with reservations.ARebecca Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ. Lib., Highland Heights
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 329 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (April 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312198337
• ISBN-13: 978-0312198336
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (104 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,073,675 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I agree with the New Yorker (for once!), July 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Basic Eight (Hardcover)

The New Yorker called this one of the best first novels of the year, and I wholeheartedly agree. I read this book awhile ago, and I've been watching, with amusement, the love-hate relationship that people are having with it on this site. What seems clear is that some people are completely misunderstanding this novel. To call it shallow, silly and stupid is to insult the narrator, not the book. I think Handler does a splendid job of hiding a gripping story in between the lines of his character's diary--a character who is, after all, a high school girl, and it needs to be read twice, not because it's William Shakespeare but because there's a twist ending which makes you go back and see how well the author planned the whole thing out. This novel isn't for everyone--only for people intelligent and engaged enough to tell the narrator from the author. (And no, just for the record, I'm not the author's friend, agent, whatever...)

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well, it won't be an Oprah Book!, August 26, 2000

By 

"alexwriter" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Basic Eight (Paperback)

. . . but anyone who loves black comedy should read it -- twice. At first, this book seems like it's just going to be a wild romp through high school -- complete with kids who throw lavish dinner parties in sculpture gardens and drink cappuccino at coffee bars with names like Bean and Nothingness or Death Before Decaf. Only hitch is, we already know that the seemingly sweet ("fat", dowdy, lovesick) anti-heroine, Flannery Culp, has been convicted of the Satanic murder of her crush, Adam State in one of the media events of the century. How could this happen? The rest of the book is a puzzle, and we get it in pieces. From Dr. Eleonor Tert (a formerly drug-addicted flight attendant turned guru), Winnie Moprah (no relation, I'm sure), and even Guiness Book-reciting Flora Habstadt (who, Flannery assures us, was never one of the Basic Eight). And especially, from Flannery, who interrupts her perpetual prison solitaire game to explain how her love notes to Adam, experimentation with absinthe (Poe's drug of choice), her calculus teacher's command to "do something" (surely he didn't mean murder), and particularly, her coffee dates with the glamorous Natasha lead to . . . well, read it and find out.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I think I'm in love with Daniel Handler, August 2, 2002

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Basic Eight (Paperback)

Having read the first eight Lemony Snicket books to my daughter, it occurred to me that the literary output of the author's legal, literary, and social representative, Daniel Handler, might be equally delightful. I was not disappointed. *The Basic Eight* is a gem of a book. It grows on you as you read, building eventually into a book that cannot be put down--particularly toward the end of October in the narrative--and it leaves you thinking about it long after you've read the last page.

Mr. Handler, moreover, is a wonderful writer. The plotting of the book is masterful, and the pages are littered with beautiful, apt phrases/sentences--pearls, one might say--which one wants to linger over--over which one wants to linger. (For example, on p. 280: "I craned my neck to see who this person was, raised by wolves in some San Francisco wilderness and finally escaping by public transportation.")

Some reviewers have complained of inconsistencies in the narrative over the figure of Natasha--I'll not be more specific, as this isn't a spoiler. But, while I haven't reread the book to verify that everything is thus explicable, I think the point is that the whole story is being told through Flan's rather unreliable perspective. Surely that is explanation enough?

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece