The Honeywood File

And in between all of these painfully, uncannily realistic letters, the editor is writing little commentary on how each party handles this situation. 'This letter should have been more straightforward' or 'we can see now how the architect is worried this will compromise his future work' and sometimes just cheerleading a well-written rebuff. At one point after the client Sir Brash handles a situation well, he writes: 'Bravo! A bag of nuts to Sir Leslie Brash.'

Noted on April 22, 2025

And I'm not exempt! The whole book is like holding up a mirror to my careers worth of email. I've written every single one of these letters.

I've been the designer, of course, trying convince a client to not make a disastrous late-breaking change (while still knowing I also need to keep that client happy enough to pay their invoice). And giving half-baked instructions to a developer causing them heartache. I've been the client, standing on the sidewalk outside the job site of my own house and asking: is that right? Are you sure? And wondering if (and how) I'm getting screwed by the trades. And I've been the tradesperson executing a project and dealing with contradictory instructions from all parties, while still trying to both do a job I'm proud of at the end, to good standards, while working to a budget and timeline that I didn't set.

Noted on April 22, 2025

I've been a working professional in the design field for 20+ years now, and I've had this sense that miscommunication and passive-aggressiveness and cover-your-ass wishy-washiness is somehow a product of EMAIL culture. That if we didn't have email, we could write just meet and solve problems together, or send a single letter that meant-what-it-said-and-said-what-it-meant and at LEAST we wouldn't screw up our projects so badly. Here I mean 'we' as in 'Western Civilization'.

But this piece of fiction is from 1929, and it's all letters, and telegrams! And everything you hate about your email job, every little shitty piece corporate speak of 'per my last email' and 'the contract states' and 'this is out of scope' is just already here. We've been doing it this way all along! Maybe the pyramids didn't have this kind of BS when they were built. But I'm starting to think so.

Noted on April 22, 2025

OK, this made it to my to-read list as a funny epistolary novel. It's a series of 'found' letters and telegrams between an architect, his client, and the contractors and side characters involved in designing and building a house, along with some small commentary on some of the missives from a narrator (who 'found' the file). It's from 1929.

Reader: this is not funny. Or at least, not at first. It's paaaaaainful. It's so true to life! The most sympathetic character is the architect here, and this captures exactly what it's like to work with a client, and have contractors or developers take your work and execute it. There are miscommunications, shifting alliances, optimism and pessimism, distrust and hope. The things that go wrong are not outlandish, they're not comedic. They're just things that happen: the client visits the building site, sees the brickwork going up and says 'I wanted reddish pink not pinkish red brick, you must fix this immediately. The first hundred pages of this just FELT LIKE WORK.

But after that I started to enjoy it, in the same way I enjoy watching videos of train crashes. This is going so wrong! It's so bad! And every step of this is predictable!

By page 200 I've been convinced: this is a masterpiece of subtle cringe. A work of art.

Noted on April 22, 2025