Literary disappointments

As I've been reflecting on what I've been reading over the past 5-6 years (here and here), I see quite a few books that were terrific, but also a lot where I could see some literary merit or something of interest, but the whole thing didn't quite gel for me.  I suspect that I am getting more critical in my late middle age, as I start wondering if it really was worth the time to read this particular novel vs. another (and more pressingly instead of getting through a truly huge backlog of movies that I ought to watch), to say nothing of doing more creative writing on my own.  There isn't much point in griping about books that just missed by a bit.  Those are almost certainly books that I just read at the wrong time, and I would have enjoyed them more if I wasn't so stressed or what have you.  Still, it does make me wonder if I should be reading a bit more in the comic vein or to stick to shorter novels for the time being.  My TBR pile, even the interim one, is still overloaded with serious, challenging books.

While I don't really dwell on it, there are some books that I just find (or found) very unsatisfying.  I thought I would examine them a bit to see if there was a common thread.

Number one has to be Proust.  I just find this almost unreadable in terms of the really off-putting length and density of text that is just too much for the very slight story to bear.  The whole thing seems out of proportion to me, and I do think it must be the most over-rated novel or series of novels in literary history (with many critics of the mid 20th C. saying that it was the epitome of the novel).  Beyond this, I've decided that while it is not essential for me to "like" all the characters in a novel or even just the main ones, I can't be in a position where I detest them all, which is how I feel about the really unpleasant people running through Proust.

I am getting a bit tired of the really feckless characters in Barbara Comyns' novels, though they are usually balanced by a serious character or a kind of appalling self-involved artistic type.  Still, these novels are short, and I don't have to live with these characters for too long, so it makes looking in on their world bearable.  No question that I would never want to live near any of them in real life, however.  Now I did find the balance off in Molly Keane's Treasure Hunt where the feckless characters really seem to overwhelm (and are deliberately undermining) the two sensible characters (the younger generation) in their attempt to keep their Irish estate from being taken over by the bank essentially.  I really did dislike two of the characters (and the sullen servants weren't much better), so this was a book I struggled with.  I know this was supposed to be a frothy comedy perhaps somewhat in the vein of Arsenic and Old Lace (and actually Treasure Hunt was originally a play that ran for a year in London -- with Gielgud directing), but I just found myself getting steamed up a bit too often to actually enjoy it.

I'm not crazy about books that rely too heavily on coincidence.  Yes, life can be a bit unpredictable, but it usually doesn't end up with characters all criss-crossing and bumping into each other at exactly the right (or wrong) moment.  I really found myself disgusted with The Sea Captain's Wife after some truly incredible coincidence occurred to redirect the plot.  While it didn't quite live up to my overall expectations for other reasons, I actually felt that Dickner's Nikolski had an acceptable level of coincidence.

There's a different kind of plot that actually annoys me a bit more and that is watching a villain spin amazing webs to trap the protagonist and being so clever that they can make anything work for them and thus they actually thrive on coincidences.  This is epitomized (to me) by Othello.  I actually find Othello a quite disappointing play because in addition to Iago's almost super-human ability to turn coincidence to his benefit, it also requires his wife to stay silent when she has opportunities to clear up the various misunderstandings.  So there are several people with strong moral failings here, but also dramatically I don't care that much for this formulation (not that this has never happened in "real life").  I thought that Elizabeth Jane Howard's Falling depended too much on Henry (a con artist) being essentially a modern day incarnation of Iago.  However, he pushes a bit too hard (to try to ensnare his latest victim) and things unravel a bit more quickly than he expected.  It's hard to quite put my finger on the problem here, but it didn't quite measure up.  (However, I should note that I did not have nearly as strong negative reaction to Falling as to these other books.)

The worst is when a book is going along pretty well but then the ending completely spoils the book.  Either it is just too implausibly upbeat (some have criticized Adam Bede for this) or it comes out of the blue and has no real relation to the rest of the plot (this is how I felt about The Mill on the Floss, which I felt had a terrible ending that really did piss me off and undermined the book's strengths).  Conversely, Gadda's That Awful Mess on Via Merulana kind of limped across the finish line without actually solving the mysteries adequately. I thought That Awful Mess was another one of those novels, like Remembrance, with a completely outsized literary reputation relative to its actual merit.

Some books are just too bleak for me at a particular time in my life.  This was the case with Cormac McCarthy's The Road which I just couldn't enjoy.  Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black was fairly bleak and it also insisted within the frame of the novel that we had to accept that paranormal activity was real, so this wasn't a book that did a lot for me.  At the moment, I am finding Edward Gorey too bleak, but I'll probably feel differently later and enjoy it for its over-the-top bleakness.  Edward Gorey doesn't expect to be taken seriously, but Cormac McCarthy does, and that makes a big difference... 

Conversely, a book can be too frothy or too insubstantial for me at a particular time.  Usually, I know ahead of time to not pick up those books when I am in one of "those moods."

If you read a huge number of books (as I try to) and work through the oeuvre of specific novelists, you can find they start repeating themselves -- and this somewhat devalues all their books.  This may not be a problem for more casual readers.  Saul Bellow definitely falls into this category, as does Hanif Kureishi; both seem to be working out their personal problems on the page.  Barbara Comyns comes close, but she does recycle the situations a bit.  Barbara Pym also comes uncomfortably close to having written the same novel over and over.  The next time around, I will space her novels out more (than one a month).  I'm sure there are other examples, but I can't think of them off hand.  It really does make it even more impressive when thinking about those other authors with more than 5 or so novels who are able to shake things up and not fall into a rut.

I think the hardest thing is that I like books that are literary but if they cross that line into being "too literary," then I no longer enjoy them.  For me, Nabokov falls into this camp: I just really don't like his characters, his preoccupations or his style.  I will probably try to get through one or two more of the books "everyone" should read and then kick him to the curb.

To be fair, most of the books on these lists had something to offer me, even if it was something that I came to appreciate and/or enjoy a bit later.  And there are long stretches where there were a lot of good books with only a few minor disappointments along the way.  It is hardly a surprise that when I am working my way through "marginal" books where I expect only a few will win their way to a permanent space on the shelves that the hit ratio will be lower.  There are in fact a few novels on the list that I have been looking forward to for some time and should get to them by late summer.  (Now having unreasonably high expectations can itself be a serious problem (my expectations were certainly too high for Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Terrorist for example), but that's a topic for another day.)