Ibid: A Life [Hardcover]

Mark Dunn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2004

Mark Dunn returns for his third novel with MacAdam/Cage with Ibid, a novel written entirely in footnotes. "Being one of those rare birds who actually reads footnotes," comments Dunn, "I often find myself rewarded by my time spent in the margins. Many authors give themselves wonderful license in their footnotes to let their guard down, even get a little frisky and mischievous." And so the idea for Ibid was born. Dunn pushes this propensity to the limit, and has created a full-length hilarious novel entirely upon the margins of a fictitious text. Ibid tells the fictional story of Jonathan Blashette, great American entrepreneur and humanitarian, illuminating his life, 1888-1962, offering, along the way, glimpses into the lives of many of those who populated his expansive world. A comedic Typhoid Mary, Jonathan's life makes us both wince and laugh at those misplaced intentioned and the ideals of a century that perhaps took itself just a little too seriously. Dunn holds up a funhouse mirror at the pedestaled residents of the age and asks why so many of the more famous ones did so many stupid things and rarely got called for them.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Mark Dunn's early forays into the novel, Ella Minnow Pea and Welcome to Higby, were praised by critics and relished by bibliophiles for their linguistic gamesmanship. But Ibid: A Life easily outdoes its predecessors for literary audacity. The novel purports to be not a novel at all, but the endnotes of a biography. The main text of the supposed life of Jonathan Bashette was destroyed by a careless editor, and, as the wearied author reports in the letters which begin the book, his publisher has decided that the notes can stand alone.

At first, the conceit makes for difficult reading, but Dunn does a remarkable job of slowly revealing three-legged Jonathan Blashette and his odd world without ever departing from the footnote form. Readers learn that Blashette, born in Pettiville, Arkansas, in 1888, was doomed by his extra leg to become a sideshow attraction. But the boy escapes the circus to become a soldier in World War I. There, in the trenches, he first glimpses (or smells) his future calling: male underarm deodorants. Upon his return to the States, he launches the Dandy-de-odor-o Corporation and marries several times (each wife meeting a bizarre end in the cursed city of Boston). Though rocked by adversity, the fictional Blashette lives a rich life full of encounters with the writers, politicians, artists, and celebrities that marked the 20th Century.

Rather than being a limitation in this quirky Horatio Alger story, the notes offer Dunn freedom to explore the diversity of his imagination with brief sketches and "back-story" that are, in fact, all the story there is. The novel becomes a pastiche of parodies of famous documents, speeches, and poems. Dunn includes the "full text" of Lou Gehrig's farewell speech at Yankee Stadium (which includes thanks for a "'Waldorf' Wardrobe Trunk with vulcanized fiber binding and built-in shoe pockets!") and an alternate version of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 steps, complete with consideration of Dolores Del Rio as a "power greater than ourselves." Throughout, Dunn references one obscure fictional book after another, from Ringleader: A Life in Circus Management, with a Foreword by the Bastard Ringling Brother "Skippy" to a collection of letters sent to a urologist, Confessions to a Pee Pee Doctor.

Ibid's humor, an odd mix of Monty Pythonesque potty jokes and highbrow political and literary satire, may not be for everyone. But Dunn's deft contortion of the usual elements of storytelling into this odd formal experiment proves to be a perfect showcase for his unique wit and intellect. Ibid may not be the Great American Novel, but it is certainly the cleverest American endnotes ever to see print. --Patrick O'Kelley

From Publishers Weekly

Chalk it up to a post-ironic age or a growing impatience with a certain precious experimentalism linked (possibly unfairly but permanently) to the McSweeney's crowd. The bloom is off the rose on certain types of literary exercise, in this case a novel composed entirely of footnotes to a lost biography of the fictitious Jonathan Blashette, a three-legged circus performer and later CEO of Dandy-de-odor-o Inc., a men's deodorant company. Reading Dunn's third novel is rather like being served a dinner consisting entirely of turkey necks: you're starving for the whole bird—in this instance, the biography manuscript, supposedly lost in a soapy bath by Dunn's editor. The footnotes cover a life brimming with historical significance; not only does Blashette serve in WWI, he loses a stepson to WWII and rubs shoulders with, to name a handful, James Joyce, Greta Garbo, Nelson Rockefeller, Rudolph Valentino and Ray Kroc. While Dunn succeeds in affectionately and mischievously portraying history as a live, malleable and ever-developing construct enriched and expanded by its minor players, even the fictitious ones, his sometimes juvenile jokes—e.g. one of his "sources," a collection of letters to a urologist, is subtitled Notes to a Pee Pee Doctor—aren't very funny. And Dunn, like the class clown, can barely keep a straight face even when describing the casualties of war; he also kills off two important characters in freak accidents. The book reads as if Dunn had a brilliant time writing it, but readers may find the going tougher.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 269 pages
• Publisher: Macadam Cage Pub; First Edition edition (March 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1931561656
• ISBN-13: 978-1931561655
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,822,623 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, Clever and Unique, March 9, 2004

By 

bert1761 (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ibid: A Life (Hardcover)

While not quite the phenomenal success as his debut novel, "Ella Minnow Pea," "Ibid" again dazzles us with Mr. Dunn's originality and wordplay. The book has more laugh-out-loud moments than any other I've read in a long time. While the book also tells an interesting and moving story, the structure of the book -- i.e., telling the story through the footnotes to a lost biography of the protagonist -- does keep the reader at a bit of a distance, so that the story is not quite as involving as it might otherwise have been. Nevertheless, "Ibid" is a treat that I would recommend highly to anyone who enjoys a good laugh and an unusual story about quirky characters and situations.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Help! Ibid, February 18, 2007

By 

E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ibid: A Novel (Paperback)

It's a pretty brave idea -- a story told entirely through the footnotes of a destroyed novel.

Even a brilliant experimental author like Italo Calvino might have blanched at writing something like this, and Mark Dunn gives it a solid try. The result is a mixed bag -- a wonderfully colourful main character with epic experiences, but written in a densely rambling style.

The novel opens with an exchange of letters between Dunn and his editor. The editor tells Dunn that due to her three-year-old son, the only copy of his manuscript has been reduced to soggy pulp -- the only part left is the footnotes. The editor is willing to publish these, without the novel they belong to, and after a bit of dithering Dunn agrees.

The footnotes sketch out the story of Jonathan Blashette, a man born with three legs. Unsurprisingly his life is an interesting one: he becomes a circus frreak, falls in love many times (a pockmarked prostitute, a transvestite, and a girl whose "life is snuffed out in a tsunami of molasses," among others), goes to war, becomes a deodorant king, and encounters countless important personages -- celebrities, inventors, politicians, and more.

"Ibid" sounds like an impossible way to write a book, let alone a fictional memoir. Come on, who can tell a story through footnotes, which by definition are dependent on the main text? Which in this case, was destroyed in a bathtub by a three-year-old?

But Dunn actually does a pretty decent job bringing Blashette's story to life, through a series of notes for the text we never see. These footnotes are detailed and kind of kooky (Greta Garbo announcing, "I vant to be alone... with this big plate of sliced beets. Bring me some tripe!"), and touch on major world events like the invention of the jigsaw puzzle.

Unfortunately, "Ibid" keeps getting tangled in its own oddball narrative. It starts off well through the weird letters ("I know you never use the phone, fearing electrical shock") and Blashette's boyhood, but then Dunn seems to realize that this is going to be a very short book, and some of the footnotes become so extensive and rambling that the story gets lost.

That's too bad, because Blashette's story is so fascinating that you wish the manuscript hadn't been wrecked. Blashette is a likably strange guy with a compassionate streak, who runs into all sorts of weird people over the course of his life -- including some who were real, as a racist (fictional) letter from Frank L. Baum displays.

"Ibid: A Novel" is a strange, ambitious novel that trips over its own feet (all three of them). It has some definite flaws, but is still a pleasantly kooky read.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A man's reach should exceed his grasp, and this time it did, July 6, 2005

By 

Richard L. Goldfarb (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ibid: A Novel (Paperback)

I adored Ella Minnow Pea. It was witty, well-paced, inventive, funny and endearing. It is rare that a comic novel packs such a serious message.

Ibid., the story of three-legged Jonathan Bleshette, carried solely through "endnotes" because the manuscript was lost in a bathtub, is another self-conscious attempt by Dunn to reinvent the novel. I would like to think that he succeeded, and indeed about 20 pages into the book I thought he'd succeeded admirably.

Unfortunately, as the book goes on, it seems more and more like a one-note piano. Bleshette is, again quite consciously, like Zelig (or the uncredited Forrest Gump); he meets numerous famous people in his life, often in unusual ways. There is a constant theme of the women in his life meeting their end in Boston, until his great love, the prostitute Great Jane, breaks the "Boston curse". But so what. Despite his ability as a novelist to invent any source he wants, from transcripts of conversations to the notes Bleshette and the future Rudolph Valentino scribbled for stage names for the latter and a deodorant brand for the former, Dunn fails to make either Bleshette or the other characters come alive. The last two-thirds of the novel are rather boring, and little comes of the possibilities that the first bits promised.

Great Jane, for instance, seems at first to have possibilities, and although she ends up as Lady Jane, and tries to save prostitutes from that life, we never get to know her much, or see her plying her trade. The various hangers-on at the deodorant factory have fewer possibilities (the running joke of "she's the one" "no, she's not" is okay but gets tiresome) and Jonathan's relatives seem to come and go without much purpose, the only exception being his father who comes to learn Yiddish after spending his whole life in Arkansas before Jonathan moved him to New York.

But the real problem is the possibilities for Jonathan himself that are not explored in sufficient detail. You'd think a man with three legs would have a set of interesting encounters with tailors; nope. Jonathan goes to war; how were his uniforms made? Can he use three legs as a tripod and hold a machine gun better? No idea. Are there rules to sports that can be gotten around if you have three legs (e.g., catching a football in-bounds)? A possibility not exploited.

The endnote thing is similarly unexploited. If you read endnotes (and I do) one thing you notice is a lot of vituperativeness toward prior biographers. Dunn creates the prior biography ("Three Legs, One Heart") but doesn't take it far enough. Give us a diatribe, Mark, something totally outlandish. Pick on the guy's commas or something, or a perpetual misspelling with endless "sic's".

I'm glad we have authors like Dunn who experiment with the novel; this one just didn't work. At the end he notes his admiration for Woody Allen, and one wonders if he's a fan of the later, unfunny films. This book is a lot like them. A great premise with too few jokes and not enough character.