THE BROKEN TEAGLASS. By Emily Arsenault. Delacorte. 370 pages. $25.
This book is a treat for those who like their mysteries more intellectual than violent. Emily Arsenault unwinds her story literally bit by bit, so that it takes the main characters and the reader a while to decide whether there's really a murder mystery or just a little office eccentricity.
And, double treat, this book is a delight for those who love words. The office where an eccentric -- or maybe a murderer -- has been doing a little mischief is that of the Samuelson Company, "the oldest and most revered name in American dictionaries."
Even most of us who love words have probably not given much thought to how dictionaries are written, how somebody decides which new words make the cut, which new meanings are made "official." The book jacket tells us that among her interesting jobs, first-time novelist Emily Arsenault has worked as a lexicographer. In The Broken Teaglass, she offers a fascinating and often amusing glimpse into the arcane world of those who spend their days fretting over fine shades of meaning and composing definitions.
Billy Webb, fresh out of college with a not particularly marketable B.A. in philosophy, at first feels fortunate to have landed a job with Samuelson, even if it means he must live in a small, out-of-the way Massachusetts town.
After several days laboring alone and mostly in silence in a cubicle, he also feels a little lonely. So when Mona Minot, a young and reasonably attractive fellow editor, tells him about an intriguing discovery she's made among the files of millions of "cits," Billy feigns interest.
Editors at Samuelson spend an hour or so a day reading published materials in search of new words or usages, or anything else "notable." Whenever they find something that might be useful, they type up the "citation" or "cit" with the word in context. Editors review the "cits" when making decisions about what goes into the next edition of a dictionary.
Mona has found several cits that are unusually long and that all seem to be excerpts from a book called The Broken Teaglass. But there is no record of any such book ever having been published.
The cits sound as though they are about people who work at Samuelson. At first Mona thinks that an employee or former employee has been having a little fun. But the more Broken Teaglass cits she and Billy find, the more the cits begin to read as though they're talking about something that really happened -- something bad.
Soon, Billy gets at least as caught up in the mystery as Mona is. They spend most of their spare time searching for more cits and trying to make sense of them, sometimes alone and sometimes together. Because they find the cits in random order, what each means individually only gradually becomes clearer and contributes to their understanding of the whole story.
By the time Billy comes to what he believes is the final understanding, his years of studying philosophy are put to good use.
Billy, Mona and the supporting cast at Samuelson are well drawn, very human characters, even if they do spend hours pondering evolving definitions. The reader learns not only about what happened with The Broken Teaglass, but also that Billy is not just a simple, polite, pleasing young man starting out in his first job. The Broken Teaglass shows that human beings, like words and mysteries, have hidden layers waiting to be revealed, and that life has layers of truth.
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