A is for . . .

By TOBY LICHTIG

Plumbing the depths of literary triviality recently, I found myself wondering about single-letter book titles. This autumn I reviewed J by Howard Jacobson and F by Daniel Kehlmann, both dystopian in their own way, both truncated titles standing for a sense of malign mystery, denial, nullification. The “J” of Jacobson’s title is a substitute for the unmentionable word “Jew” – Jews, in the nasty new world portrayed by Jacobson, having been (superficially, temporarily) “erased” from Britain. The “F” of Kehlmann’s book is the title of a mysterious novel within the novel, which explores the negation of the self. It causes such anguish in its readers that it brings about a spate of suicides.

Also in this elusive category is G by John Berger (the letter stands for its protagonist, Giovanni) and V by Thomas Pynchon (“V” is both a MacGuffin and the geometric intersection of the book’s two narrative strands). I've always been intrigued by Q, but perhaps this is mostly for the enigmatic Italian collective known as Luther Blissett (named after the 1980s footballer of Watford and A. C. Milan who once declared, of his time in Italy, that “No matter how much money you have here you can't seem to get Rice Krispies”). Another collective (including Jean Echenoz) produced the novel S in 1991, and that same title was used by J. J. Abrams earlier this year. Abrams’s S, like Berger’s G, is named after its protagonist, the vagueness of whose name is a symbol for his amnesia; so too is Tom McCarthy’s C, a nod to, among other things, its anti-hero Serge Carrefax. W by Georges Perec is similarly about uncertainty, silences, unreliable memories: Perec was himself a master of omission, in his Oulipian guise.

A quick internet search turns up several other single-letter titles: e by Matt Beaumont, described as “a tapestry of insincerity, backstabbing and bare-arsed bitchiness”; its upper-cased namesake E – an “incredible” history of ecstasy by Douglas Rushkoff; O by Jonathan Margolis, an “intimate” history of the orgasm; and Y, Steven Jones’s biological study of maleness.

But here I’m more interested in literary novels. I was surprised that no-one appears to have published a novel entitled X, and was then heartened to see one forthcoming (in early 2015) by Ilyasah Shabazz, none other than the daughter of Malcolm X. And where on earth is A, which would finally supplant D. H. Lawrences’s Aaron’s Rod at the beginning of literary encylopedias? Surely someone’s missing a trick here.

Do these enigmatic titles conjure anything particular in their single letteredness? Is there something deeper they have in common? Is there a thesis to be written about them as a whole? Almost certainly not. And yet, I can’t help wondering . . .