More Baths Less Talking (9 page)

These are three of the best books I've read in years, and I read them in the last four weeks, and they are all contemporary—
How to Live
and
Book of Days
were published in 2010,
The Broken Word
was published in 2008. So despite all my showing off and name-dropping, a narrative poem published two years ago and set in the 1950s is the closest I've come to the ancient world. But then, that's the whole point, isn't it? Great writing is going on all around us, always has done, always will.

T
he advantages and benefits of writing a monthly column about reading for the
Believer
are innumerable, if predictable: fame, women (it's amazing what people will do to get early information about the Books Bought list), international influence, and so on. But perhaps the biggest perk of all, one that has only emerged slowly, over the years, is this: you can't read long books. Well, I can't, anyway. I probably read between two and three hundred pages, I'm guessing, during the average working week, and I have the impression—please correct me if I'm wrong—that if you saw only one book in the Books Read list at the top there, it would be very hard to persuade you to plough through what would, in effect, be a two-thousand-word
book review. And as a consequence, there are all sorts of intimidating-looking eight-hundred-pagers that I feel completely justified in overlooking. I am ignoring them for your benefit, effectively, although it would be disingenuous to claim that I spend my month resenting you. On the contrary, there have been times when, watching friends or fellow passengers struggling through some au courant literary monster, I have wanted to kiss you. I once gave a whole column over to
David Copperfield
, I remember, and more recently I raced through David Kynaston's brilliant but Rubenesque
Austerity Britain
. For the most part, though, there's a “Stuff I've Been Reading”–induced five-hundred-page cutoff.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that I am a literary fattist anyway; I have had a resistance to the more amply proportioned book all my adult life, which is why the thesis I'm most likely to write is entitled “The Shortest Book by Authors Who Usually Go Long.”
The Crying of Lot 49, Silas Marner, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
… I've read 'em all. You can infer from that lot what I haven't read. And in any case, long, slow books can have a disastrous, demoralizing effect on your cultural life if you have young children and your reading time is short. You make only tiny inroads into the chunky white wastes every night before falling asleep, and before long you become convinced that it's not really worth reading again until your children are in reform school. My advice, as someone who has been an exhausted parent for seventeen years now, is to stick to the svelte novel—it's not as if this will lower the quality of your consumption, because you've still got a good couple of hundred top, top writers to choose from. Have you read everything by Graham Greene? Or Kurt Vonnegut? Anne Tyler, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, Carol Shields, Jane Austen, Muriel Spark, H. G. Wells, Ian McEwan? I can't think of a book much over four hundred pages by any of them. I wouldn't say that you have to make an exception for Dickens, because we at the
Believer
don't think that you have to read anybody—we just think you have
to read. It's just that short Dickens is atypical Dickens—
Hard Times
, for example, is long on angry satire, short on jokes—and Dickens, as John Carey said in his brilliant little critical study
The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens' Imagination
, is “essentially a comic writer.” If you're going to read him at all, then choose a funny one.
Great Expectations
is under six hundred pages, and one of the greatest novels ever written, so that's not a bad place to start.

Some months ago, I agreed to write an introduction to
Our Mutual Friend
—eight or nine hundred pages in paperback form, a terrifying two-and-a-half thousand pages on the iPad—and I have been waiting for a gap in the
Believer
's monthly schedule before attempting to embark on the long, long road. The recent double issue gave me an eight-week window of opportunity to read Dickens's last completed novel (only the unfinished
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
came after it) on top of something else, so I knew I couldn't put it off any longer.

I first read
Our Mutual Friend
years and years ago, and didn't enjoy the experience much, but I was almost certain that the fault was mine rather than the author's. Something was going on at the time—divorce, illness, a newborn, or one of the other humdrum hazards that turn reading into a chore—and
Our Mutual Friend
never really started to move in the way that the other big Dickens novels had previously done. (There's this moment you get a hundred or so pages in, if you're lucky and sympathetic to Dickens's narrative style and worldview, when you feel the whole thing judder into life and pick up speed, like a train, or a liner, or some other vehicle whose size and weight make motion seem unlikely.) So I didn't worry about taking on the commission. I am in reasonable health, my next divorce is at least a year or so away, and I have given up having children, so I was sure that, this time around, I'd see that
Our Mutual Friend
is right up there with the other good ones—in other words, I was about to read one of the richest, most inventive, funniest, saddest, most energetic novels in literature.