Reply All: Ten Novels Written as Email
Clarissa, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, The Sorrows of Young Werther…the epistolary novel has a long and distinguished tradition, predating the classic doorstoppers of the 18th century. It’s a fascinating form that allows for a complex interplay of different characters and plot lines—and for plenty of dramatic confusion as messages overlap, are read by the wrong people, or are read in the wrong order.
The advent of email created a sort of electronic sub-genre of the classic epistolary tale. The email novel often takes place in a corporate setting, where it can shed light in interesting ways on the scandals and disappointments of office life. But as this list shows, writers have used emails in lots of other interesting ways too, delivering effects that are by turns hilarious, moving, romantic, poetic, and even erotic. What follows is a list of ten of the best novels written as email.
1. e by Matt Beaumont (2000)
Probably the best-known email novel of them all, Matt Beaumont’s e was originally published with the subtitle The Novel of Liars, Lunch and Lost Knickers. The story takes place in a fictitious ad agency, Miller Shanks, and captures some of the hedonistic excess for which the ad industry was notorious in the late 20th century.
At the start of the book, Miller Shanks has two weeks to win the prestigious $84 billion Coca-Cola account. The company’s big idea was actually stolen by creative director Simon Horne from a couple of recent college graduates. Because of an IT snafu, all the CEO’s messages are being rerouted via the Helsinki office, which brings the Finns in with a rival pitch of their own. There’s also a creative team on a location shoot for a porn channel in Mauritius, where they bump into Ivana Trump and lose each of their models to a series of comedy misfortunes.
The plot is pure office farce, and with its exploding implants, Y2K references, light bulb-obsessed jobsworths, creative prima donnas, and a boss with “an MBA from the School of Management,” it feels a tad dated
