Booking Through Thursday

What, in your opinion, is the best book that you haven’t liked? Mind you, I don’t mean your most-hated book–oh, no. I mean the most accomplished, skilled, well-written, impressive book that you just simply didn’t like.

So . . . what book (or books) is your Citizen Kane?

This is a surprisingly difficult question for me to answer. I’ve actually been thinking lately of doing a most-hated books post, and may still do. But the problem for me with this question is, for the books that I’ve disliked that are normally considered “good,” I’ve generally disliked them because something very basic didn’t work for me.

For example, the book that first came to mind was Crime and Punishment. One of my all-time most-hated books, it took me about eight years to read. (Okay, it took me a couple days in the end, but only after eight years of abandoned attempts.) Raskolnikov’s psychology, supposed to be, I think, one of the main “things” about the novel, is completely unintelligible to me. Every thought he has is a non sequitur. Actually, James Wood shed a lot of light on this for me when I read How Fiction Works:

Many of the characters in Crime and Punishment seem compelled to act out horrid pantomimes and melodramas, in which they stage a version of themselves, for effect. David [of Goliath fame] and Macbeth were men of action—you might say they were naturally dramatic (they knew who their audiences were); Raskolnikov is unnaturally theatrical, or better still, histrionic: he seeks attention, and he is desperately unstable and inauthentic, hiding at one moment, confessing at another, proud in one scene, self-abasing in the next. In the novel, we can see the self better than any literary form has yet allowed, but it is not going too far to say that the self is driven mad by being so invisibly scrutinized.

Okay, so I will agree with “unnaturally theatrical,” but the overall effect is still a turnoff for me. I have this problem with a lot of novels that focus on the inner psychology of a character; I am often completely unable to understand characters’ growth or thought processes or changes of mind. (And, funnily enough, the idea of characters acting out “horrid pantomimes and melodramas…for effect” is normally the kind of thing I go for.)

The other problem I have with Crime and Punishment is that it is just so preachy, so incredibly devoted to this one final goal of Raskolnikov’s salvation, which is also totally unintelligible to me. In this case it is not a matter of the writing but of the concept. Sin, suffering, salvation, the cross, the Christ figure—I recognize these and know what they are supposed to mean, culturally speaking, but for me personally the effect is a hollow one. They are tokens that tell me the novel is immersed in a world I do not understand, and signals that say I may “get” what the author is doing but will probably find it emotionally empty rather than cathartic.

So maybe I still haven’t answered the question, I don’t know. Other candidates were The Scarlet Letter and A Death in the Family. On the other hand, those again may just be most-hated books. Two more appropriate responses might be Pride and Prejudice—this I do recognize as good, I just don’t particularly care for it—and The Old Man and the Sea—Hemingway is one of my favorite writers but this one doesn’t really do it for me.