The Insidious Adventures of the Insipid Carl Cahalan

Before Carl Cahalan set out to write the Great American Novel it never occurred to him to ask the Great American People whether they wanted their novel to be written. It didn’t bother him that he wasn’t American at all, having only immigrated to the border town of International Falls 3 months prior after he was involuntarily exiled from Fort Frances, Canada (but we’ll get to that later). Carl Cahalan never even stopped to wonder who would read the Great American Novel, as reading had become unfashionable at the turn of the century. I suppose none of these things mattered much. Carl Cahalan, you see, was a terrible writer.

Carl Cahalan’s problem when it came to writing was that he didn’t understand how to use a comma. Granted the comma is a slippery device and is perhaps the most misunderstood concept known to man, but Carl’s use was more odd than necessarily wrong (the result being that one could not put one’s finger on one’s aversion to Carl’s writing). Carl would use the comma, irregularly, to separate words that, did not need to be separated. He accredited this erratic behavior to his unique style and claimed it was a deliberate effort. But the affect it had on readers could best be described as panic as they were not given sufficient time to in or exhale completely between punctuations. Inevitably their heart rates would quicken, beads of sweat would shimmy down their brows, they would hyperventilate, pass out, and without proper medical attention die. Not a pleasant scene, particularly for a mild-mannered reader looking to enjoy a sunny afternoon.

The truly odd thing about Carl’s writing was that while he could not for the life of him grasp the comma, he used the semicolon effortlessly and flawlessly. It was a sign of Carl’s great genius that he could so elegantly plop this intimidating piece of punctuation between closely related independent clauses not joined by a coordinating conjunction. But Carl Cahalan hated the semicolon, which he regarded as pretentious and stuffy, and used it so sparsely that few ever saw his astounding ability firsthand (fortuitously, his sparing use of the mark was precisely the behavior that made his usage correct).

Carl’s strange use of punctuation, however, was not the thing that made Carl’s writing terrible. These are merely symptoms of a terrible writer. Carl’s primary problem when it came to writing was that he didn’t know where to start a story, and had even less sense where to end it. His tales were full of “such and such happened, but to understand that I need to take you back to such and such a time and such and such a place, but first I must tell you this much about such and such, which is to say...” It was really quite ingratiating to readers disposed towards linear stories, as American readers are.

Needless to say, Carl’s blend of eccentricities made him unpopular in the small town of International Falls, where the townspeople prided themselves on down to earthiness and a remarkable resiliency to the cold. They didn’t believe for a second that Carl could, as he claimed, write the Great American novel. This cynicism grew partly out of the fact that Carl was not American, but mostly out of the fact that Carl Cahalan (as everyone knew) was a terrible writer.


To be continued…