'The Sort of Thing I Want to Do'

It’s possible, perhaps even admirable, to commend someone for undertaking an ambitious task while having no desire to do so oneself and still manage not to feel like a hypocrite. We also serve who stand and wait and let the other guy do the job. In this case, a longtime reader in California reports he has purchased all twenty-seven volumes of Jules Romains’ novel-cycle Les Hommes de bonne volonté, translated as Men of Good Will. The novels were published in English between 1932 and 1946, and total 7,219 pages. 

“I’d never heard of him nor of his big novel until just a couple of days ago,” my reader writes. “I saw the complete Knopf set (all hardbacks in good condition) sitting on a shelf in one of my favorite used bookshops. The entire set is of the first edition.”

 

I wonder if there was ever a second edition. That Sinclair Lewis judged Romains one of the world’s six greatest novelists is another reason not to take on his roman-fleuve. Not that I’m knocking my reader. Tastes in reading are ultimately personal and probably ineffable. De gustibus and all that, though as I’ve gotten older I’ve developed a taste for shorter forms. Among certain readers there is a romance attached to reading long novels and other books, especially when we are young. My reader mentions having not yet read Anthony Powell’s twelve-novel cycle A Dance to the Music of Time, Proust’s seven-novel masterpiece or Patrick O’Brien’s twenty-novel Aubrey-Maturin series. I’ve read Powell once, Proust twice and O’Brien never.

 

As a young reader, I was aided by my inability to stop reading a book once I had started it. Why? Guilt and pride. I wouldn’t let a book defeat me, regardless of how tedious it was. I even read Melville’s Mardi and Pierre. I read Gravity’s Rainbow when it was published and again six months later when I was asked to review it for an “underground” magazine. I learned from a review in the Youngstown Vindicator that Pynchon’s novel resembled The Recognitions by William Gaddis, which I had never heard of. I read it and, as they were published, Gaddis’s subsequent unreadable novels. The same goes for Gass’ The Tunnel.

 

It’s not always about gritting your teeth and persevering. Some long works are rewarding and even entertaining. Think of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and Henry Adams’ nine-volume History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Think of Ford Madox Ford’s four-novel Parade’s End, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy and Thomas Berger’s Carlos Reinhart tetralogy. And then recall what George Eliot wrote to a correspondent after publishing Middlemarch:

 

“I don’t see how the sort of thing I want to do could have been done briefly.”