The Bookshelf: Taking an Incomplete

I expect this column to raise the ire of some of my friends and readers, so a word of caution before I begin, that it is as much about my failures as about the books I will mention below. For I have a confession to make: there are books I have begun that I have not finished.

I don’t mean academic or scholarly works of nonfiction. Especially in law and history, I have many such books—probably hundreds—that I have read only in part, because my own needs and interests in research prompted me to use them piecemeal. An essay here, a chapter or two there, perhaps just a few pages in some cases, and I have what I need for my purposes. (It’s a fair question why I buy such books rather than rely on libraries. The answer is twofold. I find owning them more convenient, and in many cases, I bought them thinking I would read them cover to cover. Some of them I may still.)

But I am not now thinking of such books. I’m thinking of fiction—the works of literature, high or low, that I do not read for work but for leisure. Few and far between are the books I choose for my leisure hours that I cannot finish, and lately, I have been thinking about why I fail to get through those few. There are “cycles” of novels I have begun but not finished, but at least I finished the installments I started. I so enjoyed Can You Forgive Her? that I look forward eagerly to returning to the rest of Anthony Trollope’s six “Palliser” novels. As for Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing, the first of his twelve novels composing “A Dance to the Music of Time,” it provided (for me anyway) such a slow immersion into the characters and plot that I think I shall have to start over again from the beginning. I expect I will one day.

My memories of these two examples can point toward the principles that govern my reading of literature—and my “leisure” reading in general. We may read certain works because they are edifying, because (we are told) they make important contributions to our cultural patrimony. But the first requirement of such a work is that we enjoy it. We simply must take some sort of pleasure in the reading, or we won’t carry on. This does not mean it has to be fun, but there must somehow be the lure of fascination, or a novel fails to grip. For me, Powell’s work is on the borderline: I’d like to have another go at it, because I sense he has written something significant, but if on my second attempt I am not hooked, that’s it. No such worries with Trollope, who has me hooked already.

Now we come to the part that will anger admirers of the books to be mentioned below—those that I simply could not finish after making a fair start on them. The first such book I recall is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I was nineteen or twenty, the book was assigned in a Russian literature course I took in college, and for the callow young man I was at the time, it was just too dark and depressing for me to get through. I wound up dropping the class, which I regret now. The next book on the syllabus was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which I finally read in the last few years and truly loved. But Crime and Punishment put me right off Dostoevsky, and although I know the fault is mine and not his, I haven’t returned to him yet. I intend to pick up The Brothers Karamazov in the near future, but for the time being I’m still steering clear of C & P.

Some ten years later, I had a go at Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I recall getting somewhere between one and two hundred pages in before giving up, but what I remember most is that it was a colossal bore. The Magic Mountain is a talking novel, without much in the way of incident at its Alpine sanatorium, and the strains of early-twentieth-century European thought that Mann puts in the mouths of his characters were as dry as the dust in Tutankhamen’s tomb. As with Dostoevsky, the fault may be my own, but my inability to sustain any more interest in the book just couldn’t be helped. On the other hand, recalling the strong endorsement of my late doctoral adviser that Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy was (in his view) the greatest novel of the century, I have lately been reading that work with great appreciation. This deeply considered retelling of the lives of the biblical patriarch Jacob and his twelve sons is a compelling read, and even its nearly 1,500 pages don’t seem daunting at all.

Length in itself, of course, can sometimes be off-putting before one begins a book, but I find that once I am quite caught up in a story, it doesn’t matter. Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Sigrid Undset’s “Kristin Lavransdatter” trilogy, Olivia Manning’s “Fortunes of War” sextet—these lengthy works have a propulsive energy that makes one sorry to see them end. Yet, though I have previously offered my strictures against abridgments in an earlier column, and in another I have praised Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, I will now confess that my bookmark is still stuck about twelve percent of the way into that estimable biography’s 1,243 pages, in part because even the peerless Dr. Johnson was not truly fascinating every single day.

Sometimes I wonder whether translation isn’t the culprit. I’ve noted before that from boyhood one of my favorite authors has been Alexandre Dumas. So I was excited when an English translation appeared of a long-lost final novel by Dumas père, The Last Cavalier—a work that was discovered in manuscript 120 years after the author’s death, and only first published in French in 2005. Its historical setting is the French Revolution, and it paints on a large canvas. But had the aging Dumas’s narrative gifts deserted him? Was he ill served by his translator? I don’t know which it was, but for me it didn’t measure up even to his second-best works, and I could not finish it.

Since living authors almost invariably benefit from the work of strong-willed editors, it may be that posthumous publications, particularly when undertaken in a spirit of reverence for The Late Great One, are apt to be too unimproved as literary performances by the editorial encounter. Maybe that’s what happened with Dumas’s last novel. I strongly suspect it accounts for the failure of J. R. R. Tolkien’s posthumous works to gain much traction beyond the most fanatical devotees. The author’s son Christopher has overseen, in the last half century, a veritable spate of what amount to his father’s tidied-up notebooks, and none can be said to have burnished the elder Tolkien’s literary reputation. I have owned, since its publication four years after Tolkien’s death, a rare first printing of The Silmarillion, and I’m afraid it is absolutely unreadable. Compare the following first sentences:

The Hobbit: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

The Fellowship of the Ring: “When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.”

The Silmarillion: “There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made.”

I will happily stand a round of drinks for every acquaintance of mine who has made it past the third one of these opening sentences. Christopher Tolkien says in the foreword to The Silmarillion that its contents were contained “in battered notebooks extending back to 1917,” and scholars studying Tolkien’s myth-making may rightly marvel at the depth of background material he developed over many years for the masterpiece that is The Lord of the Rings. The author, says his son, “never abandoned it, nor ceased even in his last years to work on it.” But he did not publish it, and there was wisdom in that hesitation, because practically no one wants to read it. (This may also serve as an explanation for the appalling failure of Amazon’s The Rings of Power series.)

Then there’s the author who, finding great success in one kind of writing, is bold enough to venture into another. Tom Wolfe, one of the most gifted essayists and social critics of the mid twentieth century, pioneered the New Journalism with a pyrotechnic writing style that blurred the boundary between reporting and fiction. Wolfe’s greatest triumph was probably The Right Stuff, a history of the test pilots and astronauts (often the same men) who were the heroes of America’s early space program. The book, everyone said at the time, reads like a novel.

Why not, then, write novels? Because you wind up writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, that’s why not. I couldn’t get past the first hundred pages. No one evidently told one of the century’s greatest nonfiction writers that lighting Roman candles under one’s unicycle seat on a tightrope stretched across Fifth Avenue is a fine way to illuminate a true story, but it’s no way to write a novel that will endure more than a generation. For that purpose, less is more. Even the urgings of friends could not induce me to tackle A Man in Full, which is even longer. And while I dragged myself to the end of I Am Charlotte Simmons, about which everyone on university campuses was talking when it was new, it betrayed all the intimate knowledge of the lives and habits of college students that one would expect from a septuagenarian. In my judgment, Wolfe, a man whose nonfiction I have always found to be brilliant and witty, did not have the right stuff to be a novelist.

Finally, there’s the MacArthur “genius” whose relatively short historical novel, a National Book Award winner, was so full of vexing anachronisms of speech and situation that I began to jot them down on a notepad as I read, with a view to writing an essay about how awful the book was. The list became so long, however, that the projected essay seemed impracticable, and I gave up on both the essay and the book.

In short, readers, respect not the friends, critics, or even the judgments of posterity that insist on a book’s greatness. Enjoy what you read, and if you’re not enjoying yourself, stop, close the book, and go read something else. You may return to unfinished books one day (hello, Fyodor), but don’t feel obliged to do so.

Image by Alfons and licensed via Adobe Stock.