That’s why I’m copy and pasting Patrick Collison’s reflections on ten, important, historic novels here.

Will this blog out live twitter?

This year, I read ten important historical novels: Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, To The Lighthouse, Bleak House, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, Life and Fate, Heart of Darkness, Madame Bovary, and The Magic Mountain.

Reflections:

• Four of these are more than 800 pages long. The Magic Mountain and Portrait of a Lady, while shorter, are not short. Of the ten, 5 are British, 2 are Russian, and there was one from each of France, Germany, and the US.

• For me the clear standouts are Middlemarch, Bleak House, Karenina, and Life and Fate. I would enthusiastically reread any of them. If I had to choose just one to go to again, I would probably select Middlemarch. There’s something memorably compelling in Eliot’s affection and empathy for almost all of her characters. If Succession is a show with no likable personalities, Middlemarch is the opposite. Bleak House is a close second. Life and Fate is quite different to the others: it’s not exactly entertaining (or even notably well-written), but it is true and profound. (Most works designated “important” are not, but Life and Fate surely merits that as well.) If kindness is one of the core adjurations of Life and Fate, Eliot is the author that most embodies it.

• I’d underestimated Dickens’s lyricism. I had thought of him as a master of the plot (contra Nabokov), but he is just as accomplished in prose itself. “Chesney Wold is shut up, carpets are rolled into great scrolls in corners of comfortless rooms, bright damask does penance in brown holland, carving and gilding puts on mortification, and the Dedlock ancestors retire from the light of day again. Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow. Let the gardener sweep and sweep the turf as he will, and press the leaves into full barrows, and wheel them off, still they lie ankle-deep. Howls the shrill wind round Chesney Wold; the sharp rain beats, the windows rattle, and the chimneys growl. Mists hide in the avenues, veil the points of view, and move in funeral-wise across the rising grounds. On all the house there is a cold, blank smell like the smell of a little church, though something dryer, suggesting that the dead and buried Dedlocks walk there in the long nights and leave the flavour of their graves behind them.”

• Three of these four were written by authors in their 50s (Eliot, Tolstoy, and Grossman). Dickens was a mere 41 — and this shows. The plot is very entertaining, and immensely intricate, but the characters are somehow flatter. So, maybe one lesson from the set is simply that wisdom is real, and that skill in the domain of fiction compounds for quite some time.

• Russian literature puzzles me. Why did it suddenly become so good in the 19th century, and why did it decline so much in the 20th? I don’t think the latter answer can just be a story of oppression, since we got many great works during Stalin’s reign. But what’s the best Russian novel since Master and Margarita? On the issue of the rise, I often encounter explanations claiming that it was related to Russian intellectuals being excluded from political influence and consequently retreating to the artistic domain — but this feels obviously inadequate. Again, how does this explain the post-Bulgakov decline? And where are the great, say, Saudi works of the past 50 years?

• Whatever happened to the novel around the turn of the century (Conrad, Woolf, Mann in my reading) was not obviously salutary. All three are interesting works, and there is something very distinctly modern in Woolf’s in particular, but they simply don’t compel — at least for this reader — the way their predecessors do: maybe it’s just the particular selection, but I was generally looking forward to finishing the early 20th century works, and a bit disappointed when completing those dating from before 1900. The dislocation that Blom describes in Vertigo Years is clearly manifest. Woolf’s “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” essay, and her claim that “human character changed” in 1910, is consistent with the turn in the novels. She was speaking of different works, but her assessment rings true in a broader way: “Yet what odd books they are! Sometimes I wonder if we are right to call them books at all. For they leave one with so strange a feeling of incompleteness and dissatisfaction.”

• I should note that some of Woolf’s descriptions are great, even if her brooding interiority leaves me ultimately unenthralled. “The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.” “He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with existence.”

• Tom Wolfe attributes modern architecture and the international style to a post-1917 sympathy for the proletariat and a desire to strip indulgent bourgeois ornament from our construction, and, yes, Schoenberg explicitly motivated atonality in egalitarian ideals, but this set of novels makes me doubt the political explanations. You can clearly see the embrace of some kind of disharmony in the books, and I don’t think Conrad was trying to make any Marxist point. I still struggle to explain what happened, but I think I would reverse some of the standard causality, and it seems to me that the coopting of communist ideals is probably itself downstream of the broader social unease that also gave rise to these artistic tides. Blom’s description of the rise of various mental disorders — neurasthenia and the like — seems relevant. (All of this does make me want to better understand 1848.)

• The railway, and its attendant social upheaval, features repeatedly, and maybe most memorably in one chapter of Middlemarch. I hadn’t appreciated just how significantly disruptive a force it was perceived as being even at the time. (Given the scale of the construction that was entailed, maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.) More broadly, there is some sense of a society in transition through most of these works: these aren’t neat and timeless tales. You have the rise of the bourgeois and broader urbanization in Bovary, the emerging social consciousness in Bleak House, the exposure of the shabbiness of Victorianism and its gender expectations in Lighthouse, and the postwar shell shock of Magic Mountain.

• The works written before 1900 are primarily about romance (Bleak House the exception, with romance only a subplot), and those written afterwards (Conrad, Mann, Grossman, Woolf) are emphatically not. I don’t know what to make of this. Perhaps just an accident of the selection.

• Ruxandra Teslo points out that there’s a moral gravity in the 19th century works that seems foreign today: people treat their own characters as important constructions in their own right. In a similar vein, I was struck by Grossman’s conception of freedom: he perceives it more as the right to self-define than a more typical liberty of action. Perhaps because actions were so circumscribed in Victorian societies (for women) and Soviet societies (for everyone), the seriousness of being weighed heavily. * Money and its mechanics get extensive treatment in the pre-1900 novels. The details of Bovary’s debt were made famous by Piketty, but Eliot also spends time on Lydgate’s financial struggles, and Tolstoy on Levin’s agricultural economics. Pecuniary considerations are absent in the later works. Again, maybe just happenstance stemming from the particular selection, but I don’t get the feeling that it’s just that: I think something about authors’ attitudes to the topic changed.

• Today’s scientific papers are far harder to read, and jargon-replete, than those of 1960. However, the novels of the 19th century use significantly more sophisticated construction (and vocabulary) than those of today. What should we make of the countervailing trends? To me, both seem suboptimal.

• Pleasure aside, should one read these books? Does one derive moral betterment from doing so? I’m not sure. Probably not in any narrow sense. Ethicists are supposedly no more ethical than regular people — if deliberate study doesn’t help, what hope does mere fiction have? And, anecdotally, I don’t consider the humanities majors to be the moral betters of the STEM students. I do think they’ve helped with my understanding of history, though. This year, I reflected on how the major historical moments that I’ve lived through — the weeks after 9/11, the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 election victory, March of 2020 — cannot really be understood in terms of particular events, and must instead be apprehended through the vibes that prevailed. Rather than trying to assemble a logical causal chain, I think it’s more helpfully explanatory to see many happenings as simply arising from a mood. History books struggle to capture such sentiments, and understandably so: the historian usually wasn’t there; even if they were, vibes are ethereal things, and they feel out-of-place in a work that aspires to footnoted rigor and exactitude. As such, complements are required, and these novels have definitely helped me. This view also makes biography and autobiography seem of greater importance in developing such comprehension. The small details — that Herbert Hoover’s parents used to attend lectures and debates in a nearby town since that was the only entertainment available, that both died before age 35, or that Hoover himself once walked 80 miles in 3 days to join a geology class trip — say a lot about a period, and are rarely captured in the grand sweep of events. I feel like I gained much more understanding of historical Vienna and of the emotions around WWI from reading Zweig’s memoir than from any direct history of the period.

• Another argument made for reading these works is to simply better understand humanity and the human experience. There is almost certainly some extent to which this argument is valid, though I always wonder: do they help you better understand humanity, or better understand the kind of people who write books like these? Is Isabel Archer actually reflective of someone in that kind of position, or merely of the kind of hyper-intellectual James family? Karenina is ultimately a kind of demented obsessive (as was Tolstoy) – in learning about her, do we learn about love and its travails, or simply about unusually unstable personalities?

• There’s clearly some value in reading them for somewhat tautological reasons: they’re worth reading because they are the books that we’ve decided are worth reading. They form part of our cultural context, and other works probably make somewhat more sense and are more memorable when interpreted through their lens. They are intellectual capital cities: you sorta have to go to Paris and New York in order to understand the rest of the world, and whether you “enjoy” them isn’t really the operative question.

• Ultimately, a utilitarian case for better understanding history or even humanity would not be my primary argument for why one might choose to read them, though. With self-consciousness about the platitude, they are simply some of the finest intellectual achievements of humanity, and worthy of engagement for that reason alone: a deeper appreciation for excellence is itself a valuable thing.

From the tweet: https://x.com/patrickc/status/1872592892373487765