Literary Fiction

This is the wing where the arguments never settle. Tolstoy thought Shakespeare was a fraud. Nabokov taught Anna Karenina with a diagram of the train and dismissed Dostoyevsky as a journalist. Somewhere past this door Ahab is still nailing his doubloon to the mast, Emma Bovary is still ruining herself on credit, and Leopold Bloom is still frying a kidney on June 16th, 1904. I will tell you to your face which of these are shorter than their reputations and which earn every page. Middlemarch earns them. Ulysses makes you earn them. Gatsby you could read tonight and argue about for ten years. Bring your patience: the dead are excellent company, but they refuse to be skimmed.

Melville stops the hunt, repeatedly, for chapters on rope, whale anatomy, and the color white. The digressions are the point, but nobody tells you that going in. This book has lost more readers to the cetology than Ahab lost to the whale.

— against Moby-Dick

Eight hundred pages of provincial life, and the narrator pauses every few of them to tell you what to think about it. Eliot's wisdom is real but ungoverned; she trusts no scene to speak for itself. And Will Ladislaw, the man Dorothea's whole arc bends toward, is the thinnest character in the book.

— against Middlemarch

Daisy is a rumor, Gatsby is a gesture, and the plot turns on a car crash arranged like a stage trick. Fitzgerald's sentences carry everything, which is why the book survives being taught to death. Read it free of the green-light homework and what remains is a thin, gorgeous melodrama.

— against The Great Gatsby