'The Messiness of Detail That Life Presents'

My nephew, still in his thirties, writes: “I just finished reading Anna Karenina for the first time. I love it! I am glad that Levin and his wife got to be there with his brother as he was dying.” A friend, closer to my age, has read the first three chapters of Ulysses, and writes the same day: “So far, Stephen Daedalus strikes me as a priggish, navel-gazing jerk. I'll be glad to meet Mr. Bloom tomorrow.” Both appreciate the fundamental appeal of first-rate fiction: scenes of human character and behavior, closely observed. 

I paid attention as a kid when critics and other readers proposed that Tolstoy and Joyce perhaps ranked supreme among novelists. I took that not as pomposity but as a proposition to be explored. Somewhere, while in junior high school, I found a two-volume translation (Maude? Garnett? I don’t know) of Anna Karenina. I remember starting to read it in study hall. After some initial difficulty keeping the Russian names straight, I read it with the alacrity of a potboiler. I was hooked.

 

Ulysses I started reading, I remember, during Israel’s Six-Day War. I was not yet fifteen and by reputation the novel had the allure of being both difficult and dirty. Much of it was lost on me but I liked Joyce’s prose and Leopold Bloom. He seemed like a regular guy, a working stiff like most of the adult males I knew. I would have to read it several more times in subsequent decades. My old Random House copy is crowded with annotations, including notes on paper taped to pages. The book is swollen but intact. It’s no longer a usable reading copy. I keep it more as evidence of early infatuation. I’ll probably never read the novel again, whereas I do reread Tolstoy periodically.  

Early in The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books, 2023), Joseph Epstein writes: “Critics speak of novels of ideas, novels of character, psychological novels, historical novels, adventure novels—the novel can be all these things, but above all it is the book of life. More than any other literary form, the novel is best able to accommodate the messiness of detail that life presents.”

 

That’s it. Life is messy and orderly, happy and miserable. The novel, with its eighteenth-century lineage and nineteenth-century flourishing, more deftly handles life than other forms of writing, including psychology and philosophy (consider Wittgenstein’s reliance on Tolstoy). Epstein writes:

 

“For the true novelist, self-esteem and so much else in the therapeutic realm is tosh. Life is more complex than the analyses and panaceas of the therapist or the dream of future happiness of his patients. Fate, the great trickster, offers no couch for the resolution of life’s problems. Morality is richer than any fifty-minute session, even twelve years of such sessions, can hope to comprehend. Surely Proust, in this single sentence, came closer to the truth of human existence than all of therapeutic culture: ‘We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey which no one else can make for us, and no one can spare us.’”

 

That’s why we read and reread Conrad, George Eliot, Melville, Giuseppe Tomasi, Henry James, Willa Cather, Proust, Vasily Grossman, Italo Svevo – and Tolstoy and Joyce.