All Possible Plots II

Here’s an updated version, with twenty new authors, in honour of our fifth birthday.

anthony trollope

Your happiness is put on hold when it transpires your fiancé failed to correctly cash a cheque. This lasts for 130 chapters. Everyone else is ordained.

charles dickens

An open-deck bus tour of London guided by 15 character-comics repeating the same ‘bit’ for 12 to 20 hours. Then, someone poor dies outside, and everyone from the bus descends to stare.

george eliot

There came over her—as we ourselves beheld the invisible inscription with which every acquaintance, every round and breathing visage upon which one then, naturally, the other of our eyes may chance is inlaid—the possibility, though—what?—too late, now, to entertain the pregnant, sensible vision of change, or escape—the realisation, as she stared into his middle-aged brow, that she had married a tremendous bore.

philip roth

Communists keep finding new and inventive ways to ruin your sex life.

alice munro

But why would a daughter simply stop talking to her mother? For no reason whatsoever?

evelyn waugh

The spectre of God’s grace haunts your attempts to hang out with people posher than yourself.

henry james

You declined an invitation, not wishing, to wit, for it to be understood that you might have deliberately allowed yourself to be put at a disadvantage. Now your ruin is certain.

graham greene

Your only desire is to preserve an inconceivably small piece of your dignity. You are denied this, because of a prior engagement with the British Foreign Office. This novel is called The Way of the Thing.

w shakespeare (i)

You become King. This turns out to have been a very big mistake.

rachel cusk

A palpably rich woman develops an extraordinarily complex relationship to the fact that she is divorced.

james joyce

We might read the obsequious tome, related Rump Pertinacious.
The crepusculent blackwhite pages of the inky ire-world glistened quiet and big.
— We n’aughn’t to without a plan, you said.
— Eighteen chapters n’aren’t that bad, chanted Rump, sliding his hand over a genital. Reflect inwardly the siren bigbell clackclang you might send. No learning without the gross entourage, or equivocal undergraduate ambiance.

samuel richardson

‘Dearest Mama, An alluring yet unvirtuous rake has designs on my Innocence and has placed me in a sack to be transported to Covent Garden. Fortunately the sack is so designed as to allow the writing of several letters.’

david foster wallace

You suffer from an unbearably acute and inexpressible form of psychic pain and anxiety, the very inexpressibility of which is in and of itself a significant constituent part of this pain. Your name is Quagmire Gesamtkunstwerk.

marcel proust

The only straight person in Paris has a series of very long lunches.

mrs gaskell

You are forced to move to Manchester, which is unfortunately full of Mancunians. You have great sympathy for the sufferings of the working poor, but this does not stop you marrying a mill owner.

ian mcewan

Here is an artist, doing artsy things. Here is a scientist, doing sciencey things. This presents a dichotomy that can only be resolved with a calculated cinematographic finale.

alan hollinghurst

The English establishment hides a dark and mysterious secret: homosexuality.

herman melville

Your day job makes you want to kill yourself. You decide to enter an industry-specific situation where your hopes of death are more feasible.

e m forster

Things were bad, so you left England. Now things are muddled, and only a straight-talking Aunt can save you.

cormac mccarthy

Nothing can ever be right again. Here’s a horse.

p g wodehouse

You and all your acquaintances have names better suited to clowns, dogs, or sickening sexual euphemisms. An accidental engagement is contrived to prevent the theft of your aunt’s chef.

alan bennett

The declining institution on stage represents Britain, because Britain is a declining institution.

jane austen

Your obligation to make a judicious alliance with an alluring newcomer is constantly pressed upon you by your relations. You despise them all.

dan brown

Award-winning author Dan Brown has written a complicated role for you with his expensive pen. You are a humanities professor at an Ivy League university, but also, somehow, in mortal peril. Your love interest is picturesque but ill-mannered and French. This is somehow worth several million dollars.

agatha christie

The extravagant web of lies that is your home life is shattered by twin annoyances: a spate of deaths and a Belgian asking irritating questions.

zadie smith

Shameless recycling of modernist plots, because the novelist is too good at non-fiction to be called out for it.

w shakespeare (ii)

Very much like the reality tv programme Wife Swap, but set in Italy.

edgar allan poe

Welcome to your new home. Owing to an incestuous/adulterous/murderousconnection with a recently deceased young woman, all the furniture wants to kill you.

don delillo

You are a professor in a nondescript American town. Events occur. You find you are still in the same nondescript town. This is psychologically devastating.

iris murdoch

An Oxford/ Hampstead sex farce is most profitably understood as a response to Sartre, more’s the pity.

ernest hemingway

On the journey you drink beer from cold bottles, and peasant’s wine from the big leather sacks the fisherman gave you. When you arrive in the town square, you stop by a café for a bottle of champagne and a bottle of cheap wine. You hate the man you are with. You order more beer. Soon it will be time for lunch.

elena ferrante

Sunny Naples is the worst place in the world and yet you seem incapable of leaving.

john steinbeck

A meandering tale about the need for gun reform in America.

john banville

An elderly art historian, lodged in a manor house in rural Ireland, compares the sky to Poussin paintings. For 250 pages.

harold pinter

You know what Dad.
(pause)
I’ve always known you to be a cunt.

f scott fitzgerald

Ginevra Beauregard and Redmond Ingram (known as Red at Princeton) are honeymooning in the South of France. They are beautiful, clever and rich. For reasons never fully explored, they have resolved to make themselves unhappy.

tennessee williams

(An angry male protagonist wipes sweat from brow) ‘Someone fix me a goddamn drink. From the icebox, Scarlett, from the goddamn icebox!’

oscar wilde

To write a comedy of manners once may be regarded as a misfortune; to write several of them begins to look like carelessness.

vladimir nabokov

Paedophilia is ok now, apparently. Sort of. Maybe. No. Butterflies.

bret easton ellis

A series of deep explorations into what it could possibly feel like to be the most vain and unpleasant Gen Xer alive, at tremendous imaginative cost to its humble and pleasant author.

h p lovecraft

A squamous, eldritch, gibbous descent into the cosmos’ one true unspeakable, indescribable horror: foreigners.

honoré de balzac

A courtesan vomits on your culottes outside the Moulin Rouge. She becomes the love of your life.

virginia woolf

We follow the fortunes of an upper-middle class family as they spend 40 years engaged in artistic hobbies whose sole purpose is to distract them from the existence of a) the actuality of sex and b) the First World War.

tom stoppard

You are trapped within a play within a play within a play within a GCSE drama syllabus.

gustave flaubert

The syphilis moves faster than most conversations around our idiot hero’s lukewarm crush. During breaks, a list of every object in the room and its provenance.

franz kafka

You wake to find you have been turned into that most hideous of beasts, a civil servant.

milan kundera

We follow one of the world’s least likeable people through a magic-realist mind journey stopping every fifth chapter for a discourse on a lesser known part of Czech history.

arthur conan doyle

A pair of pernickety Edwardian queens flirt with each other over a series of corpses.

mary shelley

‘That’s an excellent plot idea Mary, perhaps one of the male Romantic poets would like to steal it?’

michel houellebecq

The only way a sex tourist can stop the Islamist takeover of France is by watching yet more porn.

dr seuss

I am a cat, an egg, a fish!
I bet that Dr Seuss would wish,
He’d never wrote a single word
If he’d lived to see the turd
Which adaptation now requires:
His cat is played by Michael Myers!

d h lawrence

You look upon his bright loins of darkness as they gleam in the Midlands sun. ‘Before we have sex,’ he says, ‘here are several of my opinions.’

thomas hardy

Lies, lies, misery, lies, suicide, rape, and corn prices.

jamie oliver

All due respect, it’s mostly recipes and you can’t say fairer than that.

william burroughs

[leaning back in amazement] Wow, the person who wrote this must’ve been on drugs!

harper lee (1960)

If there’s one thing I need to make clear to you in this, the great 20th Century novel of the American South, it’s that Atticus Finch is not a racist man.

harper lee (2015)

Guys, you’re not gonna believe this.