As to gellisbarber's multiple-choice "clever phrase, highbrow humor, or a pithy nonsequitur," I love all three, and readily indulge in the first two in my novel.
- "Lucidities" is the name by which my protagonist is known as he recounts, in present tense and on parallel tracks, both history and his own troubles; the reader is invited to cross "Thucydides" with "lucid."
- When Lucidities is tempted into an affair with an archivist, their liaison is handled comically in a chapter titled "False Tryst" . . . for the benefit of lovers of Sibelius.
And so on, all in the spirit of
The Simpsons one might say, where viewers of quite divergent cultural awarenesses can enjoy the show simultaneously. I was introduced to the series when it was new by a thirteen-year-old kid, and we sat side by side laughing our heads off--at quite disparate stuff. (Can't speak for the kid, but I loved seeing that the greedy Mister Burns lives on the corner of Mammon and Croesus.)
My novel uses dialogue profusely, and more often than not it's meant to be broadly comic. I'd say that overall, "humorous" is an apt descriptor for the entire book, even when the going gets rough.
And you, and yours?
