Last night I met someone who claims she never reads (anything other than cookbooks). This confounded me so much that I believe my knee-jerk reaction was simply to recite the plot of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment to her in the space of about a minute and a half—which I am sure was the least appropriate response possible. She confided that she is indeed reading a novel: Anna Karenina. And she has been reading it for two years. Now today I finished Dickens’s Great Expectations, which is a very long novel, and I note that it took me nine days to get through. So anyways, this conversation was a refreshing glance into how the other half might live: I would certainly have more time for friends, fitness, nutrition and other artistic pursuits if I read less—though most probably I would just drink more. I wonder though, if a person reads say twenty to thirty novels in her lifetime instead of every six months or year, would the literature mean more or less to her? Does your love for a narrative increase if you revisit it ever so briefly over the course of a long time? This is part of a larger question that has loomed ever more in my thoughts as I make my way through this graduate degree: what exactly am I doing and why is literature—or art in general for that matter—important?
I will leave it there for the moment and turn to Dickens. I may have been wrong in dismissing Victorian novels out of hand. I think Great Expectations is a remarkable book. My friend J and I have noticed that a lot of our favorite writers learn the art of literary thrift after working in the newspaper business, and of course it turns out that Dickens was one of them. Now, newspapers in the nineteenth century were significantly wordier than in the twentieth, and Dickens’s books are certainly hefty, but he shows respect and economy in his word-choice that I find invigorating to read. There is no unnecessary punctuation or wasted words. I read a sentence like "I said to Biddy we would walk a little further, and we did so, and the summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very beautiful." and I see something that Hemingway could have written a hundred years later, at the height of modernity.
Dickens’s strength is as a storyteller, and this narrative is complex and immaculately put together. Young Pip comes unexpectedly into an inheritance and is elevated from blacksmith’s apprentice to gentleman. He is also associated with an eccentric and wealthy old lady whom Pip assumes to be his benefactress. There is a love interest, a dark past, an uncertain future. The narrative is gripping and full of interesting secondary characters that insure there is hardly a dull moment through 566 pages.
My only problem with the book occurs precisely on the point of narrative: because it is meant to be a flawless and realistic story, when something happens that is unbelievable or just too coincidental, I have trouble accepting it. Here’s an example: Pip gets a letter to meet a man who knows about his dark past. He goes to meet the unknown person in a remote place only to find out it’s a trap. No one knows Pip is there, but when Pip cries out for help, his best friend shows up immediately to rescue him. How did his friend know where to find him? Well, it turns out Pip had accidentally dropped the original letter on the floor of his apartment where his friend discovered it, smelled a rat, dropped everything and came to the rescue. I thought this little bit of storytelling was a bit slapdash, and there are a few other examples of sloppiness that really jar the experience.
Still, all in all, this is a great book told by a master craftsman and I will certainly be reading more Dickens in my lifetime. I’m happy to report that I shall continue to read novels at a staggering pace because it’s just what I do. At this point there’s no real reason to stop.
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