Review: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
TBD
Is it bad form to criticize a novel for its font?1 Don’t answer that, because I’m going to do it anyway. If you open and flip through Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, you’ll see that the entire book is set in a Courier-like typewriter font. This choice supposedly makes the text appear like a screenplay, because the story is about a character, Willis Wu, who is… uh… a character in a TV show? Let me come back to that.
As you continue to flip through the pages of the book, you will next see that there are indeed sections of dialogue which are formatted like a screenplay, where the character name (in uppercase), and the lines that they speak (in lowercase), are centred on the page.
SPECIAL GUEST STAR
Right. I do.
LEE
Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go.Footnotes
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One of my favourite series of recent years, the Outline trilogy by Rachel Cusk, is typeset in Optima, a sans-serif which, while unusual and frankly not my favourite, did not detract from the experience of reading the prose. ↩
