1.
With her new novel, So Much for That, Lionel Shriver strengthens her already credible claim to the title of best living American writer. This won’t surprise her readers in the UK and much of Europe. In many countries, she is now regarded as one of our most important novelists. Americans, however, have been slower to find her. That’s okay. We were the same way with Faulkner and Poe. Nothing’s more American than not quite recognizing some of our most accomplished artists.
Besides, Shriver’s lack of recognition in the U.S. is relative. Her novels tend to be highly valued by the American critics who discuss them, and she has received strong reviews from that toughest of readers, Michiko Kakutani. The Post-Birthday World, Shriver’s last novel, was a New York Times bestseller, and I’m sure we’ll all start arguing about her breakthrough book, We Need to Talk About Kevin, as soon as the movie version comes out next year.
Still, we don’t need to wait for the theater screens to bring her to our full attention, especially when most of her novels are in print and easily available. Her work offers an appealing combination of qualities that seldom come together in a single writer. She couples the hardheaded social observation of Edith Wharton or George Eliot with a relentless psychological and artistic boldness that belongs more to the tradition of Melville or Dostoevsky. Exerting these different skills with immense confidence and penetration, Shriver is one of our great American originals.
2.
Shriver didn’t become well-known until she was in her late forties, and she had the talent and the will to deepen her work gradually, making the most of what must have been a trying period of obscurity. Born in 1957, she grew up in North Carolina, graduated from Columbia, and supplemented her fiction writing with a career as a journalist. She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. More recently, she has become a columnist for The Guardian, and has divided her time between London and New York. In addition, she has lived all over the place: twelve years in Northern Ireland, a year in Kenya, and shorter stints in Israel and Thailand.
The fierce independence of her writing seems to come from her compulsion to push her thoughts as far as she can take them, whether she is describing demographics experts in Africa or the pressures of professional tennis. Her two best early novels are Game Control and Double Fault. The main character in Game Control moves to Kenya so she can work on a family-planning project. She then falls in love with a man who believes that the solution to the world’s overpopulation problem is mass murder. Like all of Shriver’s novels, Game Control is intellectual and political in the best sense—not as a polemic, but as an examination of ideas in action, ideas as part of people’s lives. Here’s the main character scrutinizing some of her boyfriend’s research associates:
Eleanor had already noticed their tendency to circulate the same informational tidbits, as in small incestuous communities where neighbors copy one another’s recipe for chicken balls. For example: that if we had dropped a bomb the size of the one that destroyed Hiroshima every day since 6 August 1945, we would still not have stabilized human population: she had heard that three times now. The repetition felt clubby, claustrophobic and it was boring.
Double Fault, Shriver’s tennis novel, came out in 1997. It traces the brief marriage of two low-level professional tennis players, and presents a merciless study of their collapsing relationship. It’s a cruel book, a Revolutionary Road for our times. The story is determined to show us the worst of both the husband and the wife, and it goes so far in this direction that it seems to have freed Shriver for the more generous and contradictory vision of human nature in her recent novels.
3.
Starting with We Need to Talk About Kevin, Shriver entered her major phase as a writer. The book won the UK’s Orange Prize for 2005, and eventually sold over a million copies.
The narrator, Eva, lives out a nightmare: Kevin, her teenage son, goes on a killing spree at his high school and murders nine people. Shriver creates a bracing story of a mother who has always hated her son as intensely as she has always loved her husband and her young daughter. Eva can never be sure if her hatred helped turn Kevin into a murderer, or if she simply identified his savagery before anyone else did.
The novel follows Eva’s motherhood from Kevin’s birth to the time of the killings, and grows into a meditation on all kinds of things we don’t at first expect. We Need to Talk About Kevin plows deeply into anti-Americanism, the sacrifices women are expected to make for their children, the complexities of family life, and the dizzying questions of where individual responsibility begins and ends. Shriver has finally discovered a subject that makes full use of her ruthless psychological honesty. Eva’s narration is often brutally tough on herself and her son, and she slowly wins our trust—in part because she is smart enough to see that her version of events contains its own distortions, which are worked into the story with intriguing elegance. We Need to Talk About Kevin is an exhilarating book, alive with the author’s excitement at constantly going further than even she might have expected, and it gets better on repeated readings.
Shriver’s follow-up novel, The Post-Birthday World, is her best-known work in America, since it was released by HarperCollins with great fanfare in 2007. It would have been easy for Shriver to continue in the sensationalistic vein of Kevin, but with typical stubbornness she chose to try something different. The Post-Birthday World is a meta-fiction love story. It takes us through two parallel plotlines, two possible lives for the same woman. In one plotline, she remains in a troubled marriage. In the other, she leaves her husband for another man. The chapters alternate between the first plotline and the second, and much of the novel is a formal tour de force, with nearly every sentence in the first story playing off against another sentence in the second. Shriver also brandishes an unexpected flair for writing about small pleasures—her characters’ love of snooker and home cooking, the satisfaction they take in their casual conversations. Yet the story always opens onto broader perspectives: the rise of terrorism in the background of our lives, the influence of our relationships on our careers, and the different possibilities that we create for ourselves and that are created for us by others.
4.
So Much for That, the new Shriver novel, offers us her ferocious take on the American healthcare system. Shriver has always been good at the dark comedy of catastrophe. Here she faces a monster worthy of her clear-eyed attention to absurdity: the giant insurance-powered beast of medical costs that devastate two families in New York.
Shep Knacker is a handyman whose wife is diagnosed with cancer. His best friend, Jackson, is a fellow employee whose daughter is slowly dying of a degenerative disorder. With methodical Catch-22 illogic, Shep is forced to give up all the money he has saved over the years to pay for the medical care that his grotesquely inadequate (but perfectly standard) insurance fails to cover. The treatments cause his wife nothing but agony, and provide little hope of curing her or even of extending her life for very long.
Meanwhile, Jackson and his wife carry on with their daughter, who has been ill since birth. Her disease plays an ongoing part in Jackson’s sometimes entertaining and sometimes destructive obsessions, from his compulsive spending to his frenzied hatred of the government and of nearly everything else in the world.
Health is the novel’s constant concern—not just physical and economic health but health in friendships, marriage, work, parenthood, and society at large. Shep is in some ways a modern Prince Myshkin, determined to do the right thing even if some people think this makes him foolish. One of the novel’s many thorny questions is whether Shep’s foolishness is truly admirable or a mistake in judgment, a personal flaw that condemns him to pointless pain. Shriver’s effects are hard to summarize because she builds them up so densely, thickening the texture of her world with each page. She makes our vision of Shep and the others depend not on glib generalities but on the total force of the novel’s accumulated impressions, with their many crosscurrents and subtleties.
We learn, for instance, that Shep associates his wife Glynis with the metalwork she makes, and the role of this metalwork becomes a continually deepening part of Glynis’s illness. Without giving away too much of the plot, the metalwork is at the core of Glynis’s shifting views of Shep, Shep’s shifting views of her, and both of their ideas about personal and public responsibility. Throughout the novel, Shriver is fascinated by our possible choices in the face of death and overwhelming injustice, by how we can and can’t control our lives in situations where all action seems quixotic.
5.
Shriver’s characters are always capable of surprising each other, and this is central to her rich sense of human relationships. She expertly captures the give-and-take between friends, and the ways our friends both annoy and beguile us. Shep changes Jackson and Jackson changes Shep, but the changes are intricate and unpredictable, and they fill the novel with an invigorating energy. You come away feeling that you’ve learned to see your own friendships more clearly and appreciatively.
A similar complexity is at work among all the characters, particularly Shep and Glynis. Early on, Glynis is a monument to rage, refusing the role of loveable victim. When Shep ponders Glynis’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina, we can see the efficiency of Shriver’s writing style, which is flexible enough to accommodate many different voices and situations yet still retains a distinctive sharp bounce, like a good topspin serve:
She loved watching destruction—the big bountiful houses of the sort she and her husband had never bought for themselves filled with acrid, oily water to the second floor. The stranded black matriarchs waving fruitlessly on rooftops for rescue that would never come, who now knew they were alone in the world and no one cared. Well, he could sense Glynis responding coolly, welcome to the club. Other people’s suffering did not disquiet her. Glynis did nothing but suffer, and if others suffered too that was only fair. She seemed gratified by the prospect that one whole city would not survive her… In a fell swoop of self-liberation, Glynis had relinquished her empathy for other people, defiantly reflecting back the very apathy about her own fate that she increasingly perceived in would-be well-wishers.
Shriver’s bold approach to the novel’s structure delays a series of revelations for us about Glynis, and about what the disease has done to her mentally and emotionally. For the first 300 pages of this 450 page book, we go back-and-forth solely between Shep’s perspective and Jackson’s. When we finally enter Glynis’s mind, the experience is heartbreaking and chilling, and clears the way for the book’s simultaneously tragic and jubilant climax. In all of her novels, Shriver works towards honest feeling the hard way—by pushing into places we’re afraid to go and making them not ugly but essential, an enrichment to our lives. She might just be the best we’ve got.
There will, doubtless, be those readers who look scornfully on our choices (“Psh. These aren’t that hard, you’re just not smart enough to read them“). Indeed, for myself, that is probably true. And to those so brilliant that not a one of these tomes challenged or vexed them more than a People magazine, we tip our hats. This list is for the mere mortals among us—who have found themselves reading and rereading the same paragraph of James Joyce’s Ulysses to no avail, who have been reduced to tears by Faulkner’s one-line chapter, “My mother is a fish,” in As I Lay Dying, who may have spitefully broken the brittle spine of her first used copy of Tristram Shandy, who use a volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a doorstop and eye it with a wary distrust when she walks past it (for it is fond of stubbing toes).
William Gass’s The Tunnel is just brutal, but the people I know who have finished it claim that it’s one of the best things they’ve ever read. Go figure.
I’m one of those people, Saul. I think that should be the front cover blurb: “Just brutal.”
most frustrating and difficult book for me was Women and Men by Mcelroy, i was never able to crack the code and enter the world. Most challenging books to me are like a maze or like learning a new language, with sustained effort i can usually sort of solve it or start to understand it’s rythms and then it flows pretty well, but Women and Men just completely eluded me. Only Revolutions was a little like that for me too but i didn’t try as hard, the whole structure thing i found annoying, i don’t really want to have to put in manual labor while reading.
I found My Name is Red, for all its richness, an incredibly difficult book. The most brutal book I’ve ever read, however, remains the slim Narrative of Sojourner Truth.
What about something by Heidegger? Being and Time? He really makes Kant and Hegel look easy.
After forcing myself to read Ulysses about a dozen years ago because of all the best-book-of-the-20th-century hype I decided slogging through a long book that you are not enjoying is stupid.
So, after about 50 pages of Infinite Jest I decided it was the new Ulysses and unceremoniously put it down.
The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch. I have read the English translation, which “unfolds” the German into a confusing hypnotic and intoxicating reading. Very difficult and quite rewarding.
I found _Women and Men_ though it took a year to finish it, a novel that has grown on me over time, and it changed the way I looked at how sentences can be written. McElroy’s humanity and compassion, attributes not easily spotted amongst Usian or other post-modernists, are evident in this book as he tries to show his characters living on multiple levels, just like we do in our daily lives. Forster’s “only connect” came repeatedly to mind as I read this book, and his most recent, _Actress in the House_, which is similar but easier to understand.
Difficult? Yes. Readable and eventually comprehensible? Also yes. It requires patience and interest. McElroy’s not for everyone, perhaps, but few writers are.
Nice to see Gass mentioned, though if anyone ever wanted a reason to read Burton, Woolf, Gaddis, Musil, Kant, Joyce, (and authors not on the above list), Alfau, O’Brien, Elkin, Mann… ah, the list goes on, Gass’s books of loving criticism are a good place to start.
And the Tunnel is amazing. Wish there was someone of Gass’s abilities to speak for the Tunnel.
I think Michael Brodsky is probably the most demanding novelist I’ve read, followed closely by Robbe-Grillet, Gaddis, early Beckett and Malcolm Lowry. I recommend cleansing your palate in between difficult books with Richard Yates, whose style is so limpid that it almost feels like you’re not reading.
Tristram Shandy is laugh aloud funny. I picked it up a few years ago with no prior knowledge–just wanted a novel from the 18th C. It’s a real treat. At one point, Sterne gets 8 pp. out of a piping hot chestnut falling into a guy’s breeches. This is lofty stuff.
As for difficult, I nominate JR by Wm. Gaddis. Seven hundred pages, virtually all dialog with no attributions. You have to pretend you’re sitting in a dark room with headphones on, listening to unidentified voices–but soon you recognize who’s talking. There are also, on the Web, guides that will break it all down into scenes by page. This book is a hoot. You just have to let it have its way with you.
At Swim -Two -Birds was unscalable for me. I’ve climbed Ulysses, The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, Tristram Shandy and enjoyed them all, but O’Brien leaves me gasping.
For sheer length, Richardson’s Clarissa should be a contender here. It’s supposedly the longest book ever written in English.
And though it wasn’t difficult to read, the 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell should also qualify. It took me from November 2007 until June 2009 to get through the whole thing, but I took some long breaks from it.
I must second the nomination for Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. When I first started it, I thought I would never finish. It is now my favorite book and I have read it many times. For cunning, wit, pure wickedness, and above all, charm, few villains in English literature equal Robert Lovelace.
Add to your list (or reading list): Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.Difficult, wonderfully bizarre.
Though I love all of his stuff, it will do many readers a service to take a look at The Master’s last three: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and especially, The Golden Bowl. Pages would go by and I would not have known what he was saying.
“Mulligan Stew” by Gilbert Sorrentino was just about worth the read with some wonderful jousts with language. The sum greater than the parts? Probably not.
Clarissa isn’t that challenging – it’s essentially a bodice ripper dressed up as moral improvement. But it is loooong. That’s the trouble, right there.
Hands down has to be The Waves by Virginia Woolf. Utterly, totally and completely batshit crazy and baffling from start to finish.
Don’t forget Patrick White. Murky, baroque, and baffling, with flashes of brilliance that keep you reading in the hope that all will eventually become clear…which it never does.
I found Fredric Jameson “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” to still be a little out of my reach a few years back. I am getting ready to try it out again… It should be a bit more accessible in light of the understanding I have gained since my last whack at it.
All books by Gerald Murnane, if you can find them, are fascinating. Obscure and fascinating. One feels as though the grit in one’s reading eye has been thoroughly cleaned out with…something. They are fictions, sometimes_about_ the act of writing, in many cases, though not always.
He has a newie, Barley Patch, available from Giramondo Press in Australia, that opens, “Must I write?” As my kids might say, intense.
Carlyle’s a good suggestion. And how about Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren? Still working on that one…
If we’re chucking in works of philosophy (Kant, Hegel, et al.), surely Wittgenstein’s Tractatus goes flying in at the top? Head-in-the-microwave hard.
During my late teens I devoured ‘Wolf Solent’ by John Cowper Powys, identifying powerfully with the author’s depiction of the protagonist’s inner world. Subsequently I choked on Cowper Powys’ magnum opus, ‘A Glastonbury Romance’ and the various other Cowper Powys doorsteps over which I attempted to clamber with increasing dispmay. I now have a modest collection of John Cowper Powys first editions, none of which I have read beyond their indigestible first few pages.
For something modern I suggest Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat.
thank god someone else mentioned the difficulty of as i lay dying! i thought I was the only one. i’d also like to nominate the man without qualities, and for something more contemporary, 2666. I read the first four books and just couldnt bring myself to finish the fifth.
Kirk, please give Infinite Jest five or six weeks of your attention – it’s a rich, rewarding book. Just keep three bookmarks inside it (one to mark your place in the text, one for the endnotes and one for words to look up). I finished it last weekend and haven’t been able to pick up anything else since. Nothing I’ve read describes entertainment or addiction so clearly and thoroughly.
May I suggest “The Decline of the West” by Oswald Spengler?
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is one of the few books I’ve ever thrown across a room from frustration. I picked it up and continued, threw it across the room again, picked it up again … and now it’s my answer to anybody when they ask me my favorite American novel. As with so many “difficult” books, once you figure your way in, once you begin to get a foothold, then the magic starts.
William Gaddis’ “JR” is indeed difficult and wonderful but even more complex, and again all dialogue with no character identification was his next one, “A Frolic of His Own,” which takes on the American’s craze for suing one another to the nth degree.
But for sheer intensity of writing, I suggest “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling” by Marguerite Young, two volumes (Dalkey Archive Press), 1300 pages of paragraphless prose poetry and essentially plot-less. It’s that aspect that allows you decades to finish it (it took me four).
It also happens to be one of Anne Tyler’s favorite books, which she says she dips into during episodes of writer’s block. The book even had a few seconds of fame in the film version of her “The Accidental Tourist.”
Looking at the list of Difficult Books covered so far, it looks like they are going in chronological order. That means Ill have to wait for my favorites: Vollmann, Gass, and DFW.
@Otto At Swim-Two-Birds harder than Ulysses?!? You must be joking. Without the footnotes, I never would have stood a chance with Ulysses. I never even felt the need for footnotes with O’Brien (and At Swim-Two-Birds is far and away his toughest book).
‘apologies for getting all epistemological, but “hard” is really (really) subjective in this context…..
I read Ulysses at age 15, and I don’t regret it.
Now I’m 16, and on to Gravity’s Rainbow.
The Cat in the Hat really blew my preconceptions away.
What is it with that tall, anthropomorphic, mischievous cat, wearing a tall, red and white-striped hat and a red bow tie.
I have a few white whales that I will dominate. Did I miss it in the comments? Did no one mention Proust? I’ve read Swann’s Way, but I feel uncomfortable making that statement. I just don’t feel like I paid enough attention. Oh also, Auerbach’s Mimesis. Maybe one day, I’ll figure that one out.
Sorry I just realize my previous first sentence made no sense. (I call the books that truly challenge me white whales…usually in my best grizzly old sea captain voice.)
I’m 2/12 on that list. I’ve read both Paradise Lost & Ada. Tristram Shandy is next on that list, but not for some while. I just spent an entire summer blogging my way through Ada with a good friend: http://readingardor.tumblr.com
Have read 2/12: Moby-Dick and Paradise Lost. I have to say that, for me, both are superseded in difficulty by Bronte’s ‘Villette’. It’s long, jumps in and out of French during speeches, and has a very devious narrator — the reader has a task to work ahead of her.
If “House of Leaves” by Mark Z. Danielewski is not on this list when its done, it cant be taken seriously…
Ashamed to say I’ve read not a single one on that list…BUT (I saved a lot on my car insurance) I DID make it through The Royal Family by William Vollman. I’ll choose waterboarding next time.
Several books by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Or Kant.
i am surprise that the bible is not number one , very difficult to read and everybody have a different interpretation
it have all murder ,mystery, science fiction , mass murder ,jealousy ,erotic poems ,magic.
plus not many have read it covert to covert , one problem though no jokes !
I’ve read (and felt I understood) quite a few difficult philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger, Hegel, Adorno, Baudrillard and even Lacan, but nothing could get me through Being and Nothingness, by Sartre.
Great project, sweet feeling of investment paying off when you have suffered through some entry on the list.
If the flood gates are opened to french philosophy, well, there are many… but Lacan and his Écrits should definitly be considered. Derrida just need a friendly explanation, but Lacan never intended something as mundane as being understood. Even Zizek admits it: unreadable.
I second two books: Darconville’s Cat-moreover, you
reach the point of increasing returns.
And Oswald Spengler’s Decline-the 2 volume unabridged set with fold-out
charts will make for instant discombobulation.
Also Laura Warholic by Theroux.
I loved “Moby Dick” when I read it in the 1980s, but that was because I had the now out-of-print Harold Beaver edition from Penguin with its 300 pages of notes telling you what you need to know.
I have loved the first 3 pages of “Ulysses” each and every time I have read them.
Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus”, ugh.
Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” is actually supposed to be funny, rather than impenetrable. Melville was inspired by Carlyle but lightened up the prose.
Wright’s “Arabic Grammar” (Dover reprint) is easily the best Arabic grammar I know, but the author assumes the reader already reads Arabic, as well as German, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic, so people who had trouble with Spanish …
My nominee is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Clarissa is a walk in the park compared to this.
And of course the unpublished Chiliad by Simon Otius at unhappened [dot] com.
I’d nominate Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and The Illuminatus Trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson and Shea. The former due to its postmodern and semi-experimental semiotics; the latter due to its length. The people I’ve met who have abandoned these works far outweigh those who have completed them.
Cloud Atlas, however, is a higher achievement. Amazing work.
i guess the books were too difficult to complete the list.