Dicky Weed has nine parts and eight interludes. The parts are the story. A man with seven hundred million dollars decides he has become inauthentic, signs the money into a trust he cannot touch, and walks fifteen miles to Skid Row in velvet loafers to find out who he is underneath.
The interludes are not the story. They are paperwork. A trust agreement. A termination letter. An invoice. A group chat that was never meant to be read by anyone outside it. Each one arrives under the same heading: Found Documents of the Weed Collapse.
That structure was not the plan. It became the plan because satire has a problem that ordinary narration cannot solve.
The problem with telling the reader what to think
A satirical novel lives or dies on whether the reader is permitted to arrive at the judgement themselves. The moment a narrator steps forward to explain that the rich man is ridiculous, the rich man stops being ridiculous and becomes a lesson, and nobody has ever laughed at a lesson. The comedy depends on the book keeping a straight face for longer than feels comfortable.
The difficulty is that a straight face is not enough on its own. Play it entirely deadpan across three hundred pages and the book turns weightless, because a fool who costs nobody anything is just a cartoon. Somewhere in the machinery there has to be a record of what the joke costs, and it cannot be the narrator who provides it.
A legal clause has no opinion
This is what documents are for. A contract is the most humourless object in the world, and humourlessness is precisely what the comedy needs underneath it.
Section 7.2 of the Weed Irrevocable Trust provides that the trust shall not contact, assist, rescue, bail, feed, clothe, shelter, or otherwise materially comfort the grantor during the term, regardless of circumstance. Dicky dictated that list himself, at eleven hundred dollars an hour, overnight, and he smiled when he reached the word rescue.
Nothing in the clause has an attitude toward him. It does not call him a fool. It simply records, in the flattest language a profession can produce, that a man paid a great deal of money to make certain nobody could save him. The reader does the rest, which is the only arrangement under which the reader enjoys it.
And then the margins
The trust agreement comes back into the novel annotated. The handwriting belongs to Priya Chakrabarti, who is Dicky’s assistant and who was in the room while the thing was drafted.
She is the only person in the book paying attention, and her notes are where the cost is kept. Against the governance clause she writes that she flagged it, and flagged it twice. Against the section that strips the household staff of any claim, she asks what he meant about Marta, and records his answer, which was that he had given her the coats. Seventeen coats.
SCHEDULE A, ITEM 214. One (1) octopus (“Camus”), melancholic.
Margin note: The lawyers wanted to classify him as “livestock.” I fought this. Some things you fight.
Three sentences, no adjectives aimed at Dicky, and the entire moral position of the novel sitting inside them. Priya cannot stop him giving away seven hundred million dollars. She can stop the lawyers calling an octopus livestock. That is the whole shape of working for a man like this, and it took a margin note to say it without the book raising its voice.
An old device with a long record
None of this is new. The epistolary novel has been assembling itself out of letters and clippings since the eighteenth century, and horror in particular has never let the technique go. Dracula is a case file. Carrie surrounds its central event with depositions and press cuttings. House of Leaves and World War Z both build their authority out of documents that appear to have survived something.
What the device buys is corroboration. A narrator asks to be believed. A document asks only to be read, and the reader grants it a credibility that no narrator earns for free. In a comic novel about a man who has constructed an elaborate lie about his own authenticity, handing the reader evidence rather than testimony seemed like the only honest way to proceed.
Eight documents survive the collapse. They are the coldest writing in the book and they carry most of its feeling, which is a trade I would make again.
Dicky Weed is out now in Kindle and paperback.