I just finished Libba Bray's laugh-out-loud Lord of the Flies meets Survivor meets Little Miss Sunshine novel, Beauty Queens. And of all the exceedingly funny aspects of this 'beauty contestants crashed on a desert island' story, one of the perhaps most easily overlooked (literally and figuratively) is the footnotes. Like a parenthetical aside, or a crumpled note passed in class from a friend (obviously, I went to high school in pre-texting/sexting/and cyber bullying days), footnotes in YA lit are a fantastic way of rambling on and on about something particularly fascinating or funny or quirky or whatnot without doing that thing that editors (and some readers, apparently, not me, though) hate, which is slowing down the plot.
The first case of quirky footnoting I came across as a reader was actually in a non-YA book, Junot Diaz' brilliant The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Which, the super violent and majorly depressing parts not withstanding, might well have been a YA book - since it does follow the lives of several teen/young adult characters. There were some pages where the footnotes actually were longer than the regular text, which made for a fantastic, meandering read that sometimes felt like a walk through the woods of Diaz' imaginative brain - kind of like that film Being John Malkovich only, in this case, Being Junot Diaz (here, if blogger had a footnote function, I might footnote some details about the film, which included an office with a secret trapdoor that let you into Malkovich's mind - the only problem being that you eventually got dumped out at the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.) Anyhoo, to get back to what I was saying (what was I saying?), ah yes, about Diaz' book: please, people, the footnotes ALONE deserved the Pulizer in this book. That rambling myth about the Dominican curse of fuku on the Kennedy family was sheer brilliance. My favorite footnoted quote? Here 'tis:
Like Junot Diaz, John Green is a lover of the footnote. (My favorite footnote filled book of his is An Abundance of Katherines). But here, Green takes umbrage to the phenomenon of funny footnotes being attributed to Jonathan Stroud, whose wisecracking demon character in The Bartimaeus Trilogy is exceptionally fond of footnotes (about Stroud, and I would put this in a footnote too, Green writes: "Now, I don’t even know who Jonathan Stroud is to be perfectly honest with you, except that he is handsome and British.") Green seems more OK with his proclivity to footnoting being likened to E. Lockhart whose Ruby Oliver books are littered with the footnoted asides and tangents and ramblings of her verbose protagonist. I'm not entirely sure why he doesn't like Stroud, but I guess all footnoters aren't alike. (Although, to generalize for a brief moment, footnoters tend to be a little smart and snarky and not always say exactly what they mean, so for all I know, John Green and Jonathan Stroud are the best of friends. Hard to tell. Undoubtedly, despite any such mythical or real friendship, Green could not have named his novel An Abundance of Johns without it leaning toward the unseemly. These are, after all, tender-eared teen readers we're talking about. So endeth my non-footnoted footnote.)
Green suggests that footnotes are a close friend of the academic, who has spent his or her life reading tomes references in Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition, of course, please, what do you take me for? an MLA or APA style referencer?), and so, those who eventually go on to write fiction continue to embrace the device, often using it to meander on about obscure cultural references, or nonessential witticisms (are any witticisms essential, really?), or tangential pieces of historical information. In Green's mind, the mac-daddy of funny footnoters is David Foster Wallace, whose massive tome Infinite Jest is apparently tripping over itself in the footnote department (I haven't read it, but I guess I should, since John Green says so.)
Ultimately, for me, footnotes allow for a voice which more closely approximates the way I think - in flights of fancy, "oh, doesn't that remind me of"s, and ridonkulously nerdy jokes that are only funny to, well, me and perhaps three of my nerdiest (and closest) friends. Footnotes allow for non-linear reading, a layered-ness which creates an almost three dimensional novel that one can not only enter into, but then go down hidden hallways, opening cabinet doors, discovering small treasures of humor and fact and fancy.
Which novels are your favorite examples of funny footnotes in fiction?
