Bleak House by Charles Dickens

This summer contained reason #649 why I'm baffled that Jacob continues to put up with me. I say I want to read Dickens for our little book club. He says sure. I pick Bleak House, the 12-hour miniseries of which he's already sat through. He's still game. I find out the book is over 900 pages. He buys a copy. I'm pretty sure most people would have opted out by then.

But outside of his good sportness and the fact that both of us dragged the behemoth of a book on various planes, trains, and automobiles, I stand by the choice. I really enjoyed the book, despite the parts that dragged a little, and some tedious Victorianisms. A lot of those could be ascribed to the fact that Dickens was (let's face it) a very commercial writer. Sure, Bleak House is noted as major fiction over a hundred years later, but at the time he was just another writer being paid to keep people hooked into a magazine by installments. Wouldn't you try to make something sixty chapters long? And besides the length, I think there are probably a lot of pandery elements--characters and situations that would have been little in-jokes to late-Victorian Brits--that don't translate as well nowadays.

As Jacob mentioned in his own review, the best way to get through the novel is to pay limited attention to the many extraneous plots and characters. The gist of the story is this: there's this lawsuit, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, rotting in the London court. The lawyers are all money-sucking jerks. Everyone involved in the unwieldy and unclear suit suffers misfortune--well, everyone involved by choice, anyway. There are bright spots, though. Like the generosity of John Jarndyce, who tries to balance out his lawsuit karma by providing for the orphans involved in the case (and picking out his future bride in the process! How efficient/creepy is that?) The beating heart really belongs to Esther Summerson, one of those orphans. As the narratrix for most of the book, she has the least connection to the court case itself, but the most connection to all the peripheral characters. She's the Kevin Bacon of 1850s London.

Also, Esther is pretty much the nicest person who ever sort-of-lived. At first, I thought she was far too good to be serious. And she was. But not for the cynical reasons I supposed, or because Dickens didn't get how to portray women (which is, admittedly, a little true). Instead, Esther is a tricky voice of her own creation. She starts out hesitant, covering herself (good and bad) with the perceptions of everyone around her, but gains confidence. By the time she's making sly comments about the idiocy of her friends, she seems more reliable as a narrator. She still cuts out a lot of convenient information (there're some sneaky "oh, by the way, I'm totally in love with this guy" shenanigans), but she's more open to the idea that her loved ones might not always be so smart or so pure. This also comes in handy when she finds out that she's got some shady parentage. Anyway, I liked Esther a lot.

I think Dickens could have pushed things a little further, in terms of the risque elements. I mean, even The Scarlet Letter got away with some sexual energy. With an illegitimate pregnancy, a drug overdose, and a young couple itching to get together, there could have been a little passion somewhere in Bleak House. Instead, the exuberance is channeled into the platonic relationships between girls. Kind of an odd choice.

And because this is a Charles Dickens book, about 80% of the novel is tangential social commentary. Black sheep of a good family who proves respectable after all? Check. Uneducated, noble hooligans? Check. Frivolous rich people? Check. Sick street urchin who would live, if only Scrooge were a little more generous? Aaaaaaaand check.

Anyway, it wasn't very conventional summer reading, but it looks like we survived. Maybe some Russian nihilists next year?