Messed Around And Nearly Got A Triple Double

We read this meta-meta book for book club called Woman With a Blue Pencil by Gordon McAlpine. It's meta noir-mystery, which is interesting and whatnot: this takes place during WWII when the narrative for Japanese-Americans on the West Coast became something a lot different. McAlpine constructs this world where a Japanese-American writer submits a manuscript to a mystery editor in the days before Pearl Harbor and then the editor has to be, like, Oh, the market has changed somewhat in the days before you submitted the text. And then she has to encourage the writer to change his book from a complicated Japanese-American character to a cartoon-like Korean-
American superhero who saves days.

The conceit of Pencil is that when the author changes the story accordingly, the stranded characters are preserved in drafts and you see how, Back to the Future style, one flick of the pencil erases the identity of a character. The conceit is OK, but then they have to end it somehow, and the ending is basically OK, but whatever.

The problem is that Pencil is sort of too clever by half; the idea is inspired but there's not a lot to it beyond that. Sure, there's the twist at the end (sort of spoiler?) when the missing character resurfaces in the narrative, but at 189 pages, the book is — literally — a little thin, which is weird when the (IRL) author jumps between three separate narrative lines: a textual original story featuring the Korean-American hero, a scrapped first draft using the Japanese-American character and then a third commentary from an outside editor, the story's namesake.

Ultimately, Woman is not not cute and inspired but it's not that much more than that, either. Go figure.