A detailed analysis of Dan Humphrey’s masterpiece novel, ‘Inside’

tips

babe  • 

A detailed analysis of Dan Humphrey’s masterpiece novel, ‘Inside’

In a huge shock to absolutely nobody: Dan is every sad litboy sitting in the coffee shop beside your office with an untouched copy of Naked Lunch

Guys, remember Dan Humphrey’s fucking novel? I know, I know, there were many ridiculous plot points to remember from the delicious garbage fire that was Gossip Girl — give it up for my man Lord Marcus Beaton — but Dan Humphrey’s novel was the piece de resistance of dumb. He was working on the damn thing for six seasons, before Vanessa leaked it to a publishing house and everyone finally realized that Lonely Boy, the poor outcast who lived in a Williamsburg loft with his rockstar dad was actually a genius.

It’s the desperate, masturbatory literary dream of every sadboy you met in college who wrote in a moleskine journal and thought that Hemingway’s contributions to literature outweighed how shitty he was to his wife. But are they as good a writer as Dan? What exactly was he squireling away at for all those years while pretending he wasn’t Gossip Girl? (Not a spoiler btw, it’s been six years.) Luckily, we have the answer at last!

One eagle eyed Twitter fan paused the show long enough to spy an extract of Dan’s masterpiece, the essay he wrote about Chuck that would eventually become a major part of his debut novel, Inside. And boooy there are some things to unpack! Treat this as Intro to Writing 101, we’re doing an analysis of this shit:

– Dan absolutely loves the word glass. This extract is five paragraphs long and he uses the word glass five times. I can’t guess at what his writing process is, but it’s safe to assume it involves sitting at a fine mahogany desk, pointing at things sitting on said desk, and then writing them down. Pen! Man! Glass!

– Dan Humphrey tried to come up with a pseudonym for “Chuck Bass” and created “Charlie Trout” and that’s all you need to know about how straight up dumb he is.

– Just trying to imagine Dan writing “sexy women” in a novel and it makes me feel so deeply, deeply uncomfortable that I’m going to stop for the sake of my health.

– You know when you first start writing, like at school, and you’re teacher says something dumb like “don’t use the same word more than once”? And you stick to this rule as a little baby writer because you think a thesaurus makes you intelligent, even though actually you sound like Joey when he called Chandler and Monica “humid, pre-prosessing homo sapiens with full sized aortic pumps.” That’s what Dan has done here with his descriptions for booze, smashing out the synonym key with such wild abandon that by paragraph two he’s calling it “brown liquid”. Come on dude.

– Why is Birthday capitalized?

– There is a typo in the first sentence, xoxo.

Dan Humphrey explaining to his publisher why his novel uses the word glass 240082901815 times, colorised 2008.

– Just an aside here that the character of Dan Humphrey was supposedly published in both The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

– I know that Gossip Girl is some sort of nouveau Edith Wharton decadent rich kid shit and they truly do live in another world, but there is no way that Charlie has been drinking at a bar in New York since he was 13, and that bar is still open, and barman Joe is not in prison. When I was 23, I asked a doorman on the LES to take me at my word when I left my ID at home and he immediately told me to fuck off. Ah, the big city!

– Judging from the seriously uncreative title ‘5.19.91’ Chuck Bass is a Taurus??? False, he is a Gemini if I have ever seen one. Bad writing.

– Yes, this novel is trash, but so are 90 percent of all supposed “great American novels” written by privileged sad men so  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

@rosielanners