Reading Projects [3]: Big Hard Novels

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1.

Last time, I suggested that August is the perfect time to tend to guilty pleasures. It's tough to fault the logic in that.

But, earlier this year, I promised to update a post about a special category of book, the Big Hard Novel. So here that is.

If last week's message was: It's high summer, let's have ice cream! . . . this week's is: Or . . . let's learn how to play "Sultans of Swing"!

2.

Last summer I brought only one book with me to camp [my wife's family's compound on Lake Superior, aka the ancestral sleeping grounds]. Over the decades, I've read my way through the old paperbacks fetched up like driftwood on the cabin's shelves—the Nevil Shutes, John le Carrés, Michael Crichtons. I decided it was time I read William Gaddis's first novel, The Recognitions (1955)—the New York Review of Books re-issue is 933 pp. 

The Recognitions¹ is a cult classic, a complex, scathing satire of the art world. I'd read and loved, Gaddis's second novel, J R (1975)². It's much shorter (only 784 pp.) and a hoot. But it's not a novel I urge on people willynilly. For one thing, it consists, almost entirely, of unattributed dialog without scene breaks—not a selling point for many would-be readers. And yet you get the hang of it. I imagined I was in a dark room wearing headphones, listening to a radio drama—all it takes is staying alert to the voices. J R, by the way, is a sixth-grade wheeler dealer who parlays Navy-surplus ice cream spoons (advertised in the back of Boy's Life) into a corporate empire. 

Anyway, though I read The Recognitions like mad, the farthest-along pen/highlighter mark I find is on p. 543. I simply ran out of time—had to halt my first assault on the summit a little past halfway.

And while I was synched to the story much of the time, my margin notes show evidence of some craggy spots: 

• Who the hell is this guy?

• Many pages of baffling story matter through here—

• ???   I'm clueless—

All of which begs the question: Why bother? 

We'll get to that in a moment. 

3.

First, what do we mean by "big, hard novels"?

Not long books, per se. Haruki Murakami's, IQ84 (2009), is 1100-some pages, and off-center the way Murakami novels tend to be, but it's not hard. Nino Haratischvili's, The Eighth Life (2014), the saga of Georgian family across decades of Soviet life, is roughly 950 pages—beautiful, deeply engaging, but not challenging. Likewise, Trollope's, The Way We Live Now (1875), about 900 pp., takes perseverance and a wealth of free time, but isn't "hard."

Nor are we talking about most trilogies or quartets, novel cycles, or romans-fleuves—Zola's Les Rougon-Marquart (20 novels)³, or Anthony Powell's, 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time, or Patrick O'Brian's 20-novel Aubrey-Maturin series. 

I mean works like Finnegans Wake.

Actually, there are no works like Finnegans Wake. Let's imagine, instead, a spectrum of really hefty sui generis works of imagination with, at the far end, insanely difficult/ borderline impenetrable books . . . then, in the middle, a bunch that are just pretty fucking difficult . . . and, at the near end, a few that just make the cut (the cut being not arbitrary, but tailored to each of us—let's say:  a few ticks toward the more-difficult side than we typically read).

4.

OK, back to Why bother?

The counterarguments have a lot going for them: 

• Life's too short.

• You can read a dozen other novels in the same amount of time.

• Why indulge a writer's abstruse, undisciplined, logorrheic, etc. etc.?

The why, for me, boils down to one thing: 

Someone sweated their way past all the naysayers (inner and outer) and accomplished this unwieldy, improbable work. Someone else went way out on a limb to publish it. Others talked it up to the point where I eventually heard about it. Such a book deserves to be read, to be not-forgotten. If so, who's that reader? Could be anyone—me, you. What it shouldn't be is no one.

That's why. 

Or, to say it another way:  Maybe you've succumbed to the reasonable reasons above and resisted the idea of dealing with a Big Hard Book. Fine. No one’s forcing you. But maybe the resistance comes from the fear that your intellect isn't up to the task, isn't on a par with the intellect that created the work . . . maybe you fear you'll be be-wildered, you'll bounce off it, you'll throw up your hands. These, too, are reasonable thoughts. But what if you decide, unreasonably, to take a flying leap at one of these monsters? Where's the harm? Afraid of feeling stupid? Let me assure you:  if you're reading this Substack, you're not stupid. Anyway, so what if you feel stupid? Two-thirds of the way through The Quantum Universe [Brain Cox and Jeff Foreshaw, 2011], my margin note says: This next section threw me last time—ditto this time. Reached my limit?? Still, I learned an amazing amount of cool stuff reading this book, and others like it. You don't have to get it all. I wasn't trained in higher math (I just squeaked through Algebra II), so I stick with the ideas. It's the same for Big Hard Novels—get as much as you can get, don't obsess about the rest. We never absorb all of anything. Just . . . dive in, get as wet as you can.

5.

The List [so far]⁴ ⁵

• Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann (2019)

• The Familiar [Volumes 1-5], Mark Z. Danielewski (2015-2017)

• My Struggle [Vol. 1-6], Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009-2011)

• The Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessen (2008)

• Europe Central, William T. Vollmann (2005)

• 2666, Roberto Bolaño (2004)

• Babel Tower, A. S. Byatt (1996)

• Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (1996)

• The Tunnel, William Gass (1995)

• The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro (1995) fn

• Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko (1991)

• Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco (1988)

• The Greenlanders, Jane Smiley (1988)

• Women and Men, James McElroy (1987)

• Little, Big, John Crowley (1981)

• The Book of the New Sun [4 vol.], Gene Wolfe (1980-1983)

• Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, [written 1959] (1980)

• Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec (1978)

• Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany (1975)

• Terra Nostra, Carlos Fuentes (1975)

• J R, William Gaddis (1975)

• Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (1973)

• The Origins of the Brunists, Robert Coover (1966)

• Miss Macintosh, My Darling, Marguerite Young (1965)

• The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing (1962)

• The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (1957-1960)

• The Recognitions, William Gaddis (1955)

• The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1930-1943)

• The Sleepwalkers: A Trilogy, Hermann Broch (1930-1932)

• The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family’s Progress, Gertrude Stein

  [written 1906-08] (1925)

• Ulysses, James Joyce (1922)

• Petersburg, Andrei Bely, (1913/1922)

• Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1851)

• The Betrothed [I Promessi Sposi], Alessandro Manzoni (1827)

• Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady, Samuel Richardson (1747-1761)

             [revised in 4 editions]

• The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1400)

[Note:  Since I've read only three of these myself⁶ , I may be wrong about a few of the others—they might be more akin to ones I removed from an earlier version of the list (for being longish and/or hardish but not truly out there the way the best titles here are). They're all very worthy reads, though.]

6. 

Finally, the challenge:

• Read one.

7. 

For the record: There's nothing preventing you from eating ice cream while you're working your way through a Big Hard Book.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gaddis

2. Winner of the National Book Award.

3. Down the road, I'll post about Zola. Les Rougon-Marquart [subtitled Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire] was one of the unexpected treasures of Reading Back in Time. If readers have read any Zola, typically it's Germinal (1885), perhaps not knowing it’s part of this vast project. Germinal’s central figure is Étienne Lantier, seen as a boy in the seventh novel, L'Assommoir (1877); one brother, Jacques, is featured in the seventeenth book, La Bête humaine (1890); the fourteenth book, L'Œuvre is about another brother, the artist Claude Lantier; the ninth novel, Nana (1880) focuses on the actress/ courtesan, Anna Coupeau, their half-sister.

4. If you know others that belong on this list, please lemme know—it's absolutely a work-in-progress.

5. I’m resisting the urge to link you with each of these. Pick a few titles and see what you can come up with.

6. The Unconsoled, J R, Ulysses. 

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