In Praise of Difficult...Novels
On Monday night, we had a benefit reading here to raise money for the local food bank, and I got Rick Moody to come and read from DIVINERS, his new book. And we had an interesting conversation over dinner and I wanted you folks to weigh in. I think I may have had this same conversation with Mr. Renfro in the corner of the Foxhead once.Over dinner, we were talking about difficult novels. And by we, I need to let you know up front that I was likely the LEAST QUALIFIED PERSON EVER to be participating in this conversation...but here I was, seated amongst Robert Olen Butler, Rick Moody and Mark Winegardner at dinner (yes, Iowans, we get real writers here too). And we got to discussing the American book critic's reticence to read and comment favorably on longer books.
One of the shockers of the evening was Mr. Moody's admission that he had been asked to review Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon by one of the big magazines precisely because no other reviewer would touch it, given its 1000-page length.
In order to achieve maximum brevity and pith, I am asking--what is the hardest book you've ever read, and ideally, what did you learn from it. I'll start with two...Women and Men by Joseph McElroy, and The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. I felt I had to read them both, though I'd like the 3 months I spent with Musil (reading about 100 pages a day--it's a 2 volume door stop, and no, I didn't finish) back.
No votes for Infinite Jest are allowed, because none of you actually read all of the ancillary material, or all of the footnotes, did you?
posted by Kistulentz @ Wednesday, November 23, 2005
1 Comments:
"The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing. I read it over a winter break in college. I think I skipped showering for a few days while I read it. About two women in London, one of whom is a single mom. Tried to grapple with how a woman could live her life after some serious disappointments and a breakdown. I remember it had a real emotional force and didn't shy away from making grand moral and philosophical statements - which is something I've always loved about the British writers.
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