She's too difficult ...
Should it be love at first sight with a book? Or can you both benefit from a "getting to know" you period? Can a book's at-first-glance difficulties ever become part of what makes it great?
Once upon a time there was a fifteen-year-old girl called Natasha. She was studying English Literature at high school and had to read all the usual suspects: Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, Tennessee Williams etc. Some of these she liked, some of them she didn’t. Most of them she found hard, difficult, even opaque.
There was one book that, like all the others, wasn’t easy. It had sentences like this one:
“I feel it my duty to promote and establish the blessing of peace in all families within the reach of my influence; and on these grounds I flatter myself that my present overtures of goodwill are highly commendable.”
If, as my teacher explained, the speaker simply meant: I think we have things in common, so I’m looking forward to meeting you and I hope you feel the same, then why didn’t he just say that?!
But there was something about this book, despite the odd language. Fifteen-year-old Natasha found herself picking it back up again a year or so later. And then the next year. Until finally, when she went to London to live for a couple of years and could only take what she could carry, the one book she chose to take with her was this one.
Because, by then, she loved it.
(Any ideas what the book was? I promise to reveal all in just a moment.)
But if a book doesn’t land with you the first time you read it, if it seems difficult and impenetrable and occasionally slow or infuriating, does that make it a bad book? Should you really have to read a book more than once to “get it”?
In January’s Bijoux List, I talked about my plans to do more rereading this year. To quote myself (because occasionally I say something worthwhile 😉):
We don’t look at a painting just once. Or listen to a song one time only. There are many songs that, even after multiple listens, suddenly seem to land right in the solar plexus. Because we’ve changed. We understand the song differently. Art keeps unspooling its meaning for years – for longer than we get to be alive.
The question of reader patience is one that always intrigues me. When you’re writing historical fiction, there’s a lot to establish upfront in order for the rest of the book to make sense. It’s a time period that readers mightn’t know about, social mores and conventions are different and you’re trying to lull the reader into thinking like a person from the 1940s rather than 2023. It’s a big leap to make.
And I’m in no way comparing any of my books to the one I read at age fifteen, but I know that sometimes when I’m writing, I can feel the pace of the story is different in the first, say, 50 pages, compared to the rest of the book. Other readers might say that actually my book is slow, boring, nothing happens or is overlong. Those are all reasonable judgements and readers do share them freely on Goodreads.
I think it’s particularly the case in The Paris Secret and The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre that the pace in the first few chapters isn’t the same as in my other books, and that it’s probably a bit more languorous. Despite that, some people say that either of those novels is their favourite. (Others say it’s the worst book they’ve ever read! Again, that’s completely fair.)
So can a novel start slow and still be a good book? Can a story use language that takes time to love and still be a masterpiece of literature? Should everything just be easy when it comes to reading – it’s supposed to be a leisure activity after all, not work.