The Greatest Book I Ever Hated: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

A few weeks ago, I talked a little about the two basic functions of art, at least how I see them. Broadly stated, art (and by extension, literature) can be viewed as having two primary and often conflicting goals:

1. To entertain us and provide an escape
2. To unsettle us and prod us to action

If you want to read more of the initial discussion, go here. In that post, I talked about how most books straddle the line between escapism and unsettling content,  but then promised to talk about two books that had a profound impact on me, largely because they didn't bother walking the tight rope. 

Following that, I posted about one of my favorite escapist reads ever, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). This book helped me through one of the worst reading slumps of my life and taught me a great deal about how to make reading an enjoyable, lively experience.

Today, we are not discussing that book. Instead...

Gotta admit though. Love this cover.

THE CONTEXT:

I can't think of a book I liked less than Tess of the D'Urbervilles. While Three Men in a Boat is largely silliness to the exclusion of any kind of hard-hitting content, Tess is hard-hitting content to the exclusion of anything that reminds you of happiness or why life is worth living. I read this book in my final year of high-school, because no one gets through high school without reading at least one novel they loathe. I loved The Great Gatsby and so Tess seems to have been where I paid my dues.

When I started this blog, I made myself a promise. This blog would be about celebrating good literature, rather than ripping on the stuff I dislike. Of course novels are still open to literary criticism here, but one thing I learned in grad school was that my own opinion really was just that. An opinion. Books I hated were loved by other people. My taste was not the definitive measure of quality. So why am I devoting an entire post to a book that, frankly, I cannot stand?

Reason #1: The author of this book is long dead and so I'm not terribly worried about how Thomas Hardy will feel because I did not like his book. No one will @ this post to him on Twitter. He can go on blissfully decomposing without ever knowing I hated his work.

Reason #2: In fairness to Thomas Hardy, his poetry wasn't half bad. 

Reason #3: I dunno. Maybe I'm not as much of a happy, positive, person as I'd like to think. Maybe I have some bile in my mouth that I need to spit out. 

Reason #4: I don't actually contest that Hardy was a great writer or even that Tess is a good book. I couldn't have hated a book this much unless it had some kind of power behind it. One of my professors once told us that she chose books for her classes that she knew, at the least, would incite a response. She couldn't guarantee that we'd like everything we read, but she could stoke the fires of discussion. Tess is a perfect example of that philosophy. Hardy himself clearly wanted his reader to respond and in that he was very successful. I'm not sure "enjoyment" was even on his radar.

Reason #5: A couple months ago I had a terrible realization: The novel I am working on right now was at least, subconsciously, inspired by how scarred I am from reading this book.

Let's delve a little deeper into those last two points, shall we?

AN INTENTIONALLY HORRIBLE STORY - SPOILERS!!!!!! I DON'T CARE IF I SPOIL THIS BOOK!!!!!

While not often repeated, the full title of the book is actually Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. That in itself is an incredibly bold assertion, especially when it's publication date, 1891, is considered. The Victorian Era is not well known for leniency when it came to who could be called a "pure woman" and Tess's life is filled with instances that would have spoken to impurity. 

As a young girl, she's sent off by her family to live with a rich, distant "relative" who sexually assaults and eventually rapes her. (Note: Hardy never uses the word rape, which isn't surprising, since definitions were shady at best back then. Consent wasn't a Victorian Era strong suit, but to modern audiences, she's asleep and a dude comes at her. It's pretty hard to mistake.) She gives birth to a child out of wedlock, whom she names "Sorrow." The baby dies without baptism and when Tess begs the parson about the state of her son's soul, he pityingly informs her that the child cannot enter Heaven.

This shakes her faith, and when she meets a young, handsome intellectual by the name of Angel Clare, she decides to embrace a life of skepticism. She works on a dairy farm and this is the closest Hardy gets to letting her be happy. She and Angel fall in love, but it's not until their wedding night that Tess has the nerve to tell him about everything that happened to her. And like the upstanding gent Angel is, he promptly abandons her. 

Look, I could go on. Suffice it to say, this story amounts to Angel coming back, Tess finally getting revenge on the man who ruined her and death for our heroine beneath the pagan monuments of Stonehenge. I gotta say, if you have to die, Stonehenge is the most rock n' roll place to do it, so we can give the book that.

Actually, I can give the book it's most important element, and that's Tess herself. Start to finish, I liked her. She's smart and fiery and ultimately, a very principled person. That wasn't to say she lacked flaws either. Hardy never cheapened the story by making her perfect. But she was a pure woman, faithfully presented. We were very different people, but I empathized with her tremendously. I wished the world had been kinder to her, yet at the same time, I admired Hardy's unflinching portrayal of her life. It was like Hardy took a look at the way poor women were treated and abused around him and went, "wow, that sucks. I should write a book about this." Not many men of his time would have seen the world so sympathetically through the eyes of a girl like Tess.

SO... WHY DID THE BOOK ACTUALLY FAIL?

The problem is, there is another main character in this novel who is not Tess and his name is Angel Clare and he is the biggest nose wipe in the history of literature. Like, I just opened the Wikipedia page to double check a few details in this post and went "For the love of milk! WHY IS ANGEL SO HORRIBLE????" I'd forgotten about the part where, on their wedding night, he confessed to also not being a virgin. And yes, he still proceeds with the abandonment because he's not going to tolerate this non-virgin nonsense in his wife. (Remember, too. Because rape.) HA! WOW! What an upstanding citizen!!! No wonder our heroine loves him!!!!!

Maybe he was sympathetic back in 1891. I don't know. Maybe his hypocrisy and self-righteousness didn't sting so badly. But the truth is that the ruin of Tess belongs not just to the novel's villain, but also to Angel Clare. I don't know if I would have minded this if Hardy hadn't expected me to forgive him at the end. (Did he? Did Hardy want me to cheer for Angel consoling Tess's younger, still living sister? GROSS MAN!!!!) I've heard many people say that Delores Umbridge might just be the most awful, hateful person in literature and while they may be right, it still stands to reason that Angel Clare is worse to read. Why? Well, because there's a kind of pleasure in hating a villain. Hating a hero, I find, just makes you hate the book. 

The novel, however, is a classic, and despite what high school reading might make you believe, most classics are considered to be what they are because someone liked them. So maybe Angel didn't ruin the novel for every reader like he did me. Maybe for some people, he was part of the underlying "truth" of the work. I'm not here to argue that he isn't a realistic character. He's so banally realistic, you'll find yourself seeing him everywhere you look. But he's unlikable. Coupled with that, the book is also very bereft of hope. The closest it gets to a glimmer at the end is Angel walking off into the sunset with Tess's sister which, I'm sorry, DOES. NOT. CUT. IT.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I found Jimmy, the protagonist of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, to be unlikable, but the book itself somehow managed to portray the end of the world, yet still gave the reader a taste of hope. I'm not convinced you can have it both ways. Hamlet is a somewhat hopeless tragedy, but I love it because I love Hamlet the character. You get one or the other:

Hopeless ending? Better give us someone we want to grieve!

Unlikable central protagonist? Better be something positive that justifies our effort spent reading this book!

Uggghhhhhhhh.... Angel Clare. I feel like I need to wash my hands just from typing about the guy.

THE BOOK THAT NEVER LEFT ME

I'm writing a book right now about a girl struggling to navigate through a world dominated by men. It's a historical fantasy and takes place in a time period just a little before the Victorian Era. She's a quiet, fast thinking girl who is largely underestimated by the world around her. Eventually, she meets a pompous, self-important man that provides her a great deal of trouble when he begins to pursue her romantically. 

For a long time, I felt like my heroine's name was too derivative of something, but I couldn't put my finger on what. I kept flipping through other Young Adult novels, trying to figure out whose name I'd stolen. I wanted to change it if it seemed too closely tied to some fad out and about right now.

I've been working on and off on this project for a couple of years. It's been my primary work-in-progress since September. Only a month ago it hit me.

Her name is Tessa. I'm not changing it.

Now, don't get your knickers in a twist just yet. No, I am NOT rewriting Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I would not put the world through that again. But some deep seated part of me can't handle Tess dying under Stonehenge. Some part of me needs to see that girl get a happy ending. Or... at least a happier ending.

So I'm going to write her one. 

With grudging humility, I guess I have to say thank you. Thank you, Thomas Hardy. Thank you for writing Tess. You upset me. 

But you also inspired me.

The Book that Saved Me: Three Men in a Boat

Last time I posted, I talked a little about the two basic functions of art, at least how I see them. Broadly stated, art (and by extension, literature) can be viewed as having two primary and often conflicting goals:

1. To entertain us and provide an escape
2. To unsettle us and prod us to action

If you want to read more of the initial discussion, go here. In that post, I talked about how most books straddle the line between escapism and unsettling content,  but then promised to talk about two books that had a profound impact on me, largely because they didn't bother walking the tight rope. Today, we're dealing with one of the most escapist novels I have ever read, and one that I deeply needed.

THE CONTEXT:

When I graduated from my undergraduate degree, I was burnt out. I`d spent the last five years reading anthropology and philosophy textbooks and squeezing in writing on the side. I knew I wanted to write fiction. The only problem was that I wasn`t reading it. In fact, once my undergrad wrapped up, I wasn`t reading anything.

This went on for a year and a half. I just couldn`t get excited about books like I used to. Nothing I read woke me up. Gradually, I got into such a rut I worried I`d never find that spark again.

Plenty of people tried to help. If you write at all, people LOVE to suggest books to you. For example, my sister was desperate to get me to read Wuthering Heights, but I never made it through the first ten chapters. A friend lent me Darkwing, the next book in a series I loved, but I never opened it. I got Oliver Twist as a Christmas present around this time and it looks very pretty on my shelf. My sister-in-law recommended The Hunger Games, but I never picked it up. Yes, you read that right. I, Emily Paxman, declined to read the Hunger Games once upon a time.

And for every recommended novel I failed to get through, I became more and more discouraged. Books had been a part of my life since my earliest childhood. What did it say about me that I couldn't seem to connect with them any more? How could I expect to be a decent writer when I was a terrible reader?

So what did I need to get me out of my existential funk? What would rock me to the core and make me want to read again? Surely that book would be one of profound meaning and message! Or perhaps timeless characters and jaw dropping moral quandaries! WHAT COULD IT BE????

THE BOOK: Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome


This is a book about three men. They decide to go camping along the Thames by rowing a boat up it. They bring their dog. At some point they eat beef pie and at another they give up on camping and rent rooms at an inn. Harris cannot sing a comic song.

If Seinfeld was the original TV comedy about absolutely nothing, it was still drawing from a legacy that included British humorists like Jerome K. Jerome. This is not a book to turn to if you're looking for deep, character driven, soul wrenching narrative. But it's sly and it's witty and, most importantly, it's enjoyable.

I was introduced to Three Men in a Boat by one of my roommates. She was sitting on her bed reading, and laughing out loud. She shared a quick passage aloud and then went back to giggling. It seemed to me to have been ages since I saw someone react to a book that way. I had to read it and it soon became the first book I finished in a year and a half.

WHAT MADE IT SO PERFECT

When I look back on that time, one quality united the books people recommended to me that I couldn't bring myself to read: Every last one of them was depressing. These books came with endorsements like, "The Time Traveler's Wife is so good! It absolutely DESTROYED me!"

Sometimes we want to be destroyed by a book. Sometimes we need to be. Heavy, topic-driven, important books are... well, important. But in the haste we have to read in order to become better people, sometimes I think we forget the need to read because we enjoy doing it. What about reading because we're in need of a good laugh? Laughter is, in my mind, one of the major hallmarks of escapism. It drives both children's fantasy films and those cat videos on youtube. Laughter is also profoundly comforting, which is why it's often used to sugar-coat difficult truths. And yet a work of fiction that endorses laughter above all else is generally treated as less than something that doesn't.

Art criticism in our culture is overwhelmingly in favor of tragedy. Comedies don't win the Oscars. Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth are treated with more reverence than Twelfth Night or Midsummer Night's Dream. Who wants to give accolades to a play that admits it is Much Ado About Nothing?

Books can be trickier to define as comedy or tragedy. By virtue of being longer, they often contain both humor and drama. Still, there's clearly a difference between Confessions of a Shopaholic and Bleak House. (Hint: One has the word "Bleak" in the title!)

I don't pretend to know how comedy and drama stack up against each other as competing forms of "art." Personally, I think TV land might be the one place where the two genres are handled properly. The Emmy's make a point of awarding both types of shows separately, as do the Golden Globes. But the moment someone hands out an award for "best" movie or "best" book, you can bet that tragedy is going to take a flying leap to the head of the pack. And it's such a shame because frankly, good comedy is very hard to write. We'll watch soldiers die on a battlefield over and over again, but we don't like hearing the same jokes twice. There's intense pressure to be innovative in comedy, often more so than in drama.

Now truthfully, I agree that there is a LOT of not-funny comedy out there, which is why books and films that actually make me laugh are such a treasure. Laughter stirs my soul in a way that is totally different from drama, and often far more poignant. For me to really like a drama, it tends to need a good sense of humor. It's no coincidence that my favorite musical, Into the Woods, builds towards its emotional climax with some of the funniest songs Stephen Sondheim ever wrote.

And even though it often claims to be about nothing, good comedy requires a keen understanding of human nature. Three Men is in turn both very realistic and very escapist. Jerome perfectly captures what it's like to do the most mundane of things, like set up a tent, or bump into lovers at a party. His comedy is shrewd and barbed. The book doesn't exactly have a message, but it has anecdotes that make you reflect on the ego and hypocrisy of ordinary people. This might not seem like much, but it means a great deal to me.

Most importantly, I want to point out that I am not alone. There are lots of people who want to laugh more than anything else. And like me, they are probably shorter than you. This link (link!!!) leads to a study conducted by Scholastic into what children want most from books. While it does change somewhat over time, across all age groups, kids are looking first and foremost for "books that make them laugh." Yes, whether your child is 6 or 16, they want a funny book.

Also of note: Parents do not rate the ability of a book to make their child laugh as highly. The stat is not rock bottom low, but it doesn't reflect the interest kids have in laughing. To add to that, 73% of boys and girls state they would read more if they could find more books they liked. I take that to mean that kids would read more if they could find more funny books. Wouldn't it be great if we made it easier for them to find some? If maybe we handed out Newberry Awards to silly books, and not just issue drive ones? I'm not saying we ditch the issue books, but reading as a whole might benefit if we made it more fun.

Three Men in a Boat helped me get over a tremendous mental block in my life, and it did it mostly by being hilarious. When I finished, I felt intense relief that I was reading again. And with that, I reached for more.

Maybe you have someone in your life who you is looking for a good book. Maybe it's your child, and you desperately want to encourage them to read, but it just doesn't seem to take. Well, if it's true in showbiz, it's true in print. Make 'em laugh. You might just find them coming back for more.

The Unsettling: When Books Become Bothersome (Part One)

Sweet cover too, I might add

Towards the end of one of my university classes, we read Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The book is something of a classic within the Young Adult literary canon, in as much as the discipline has one. YA is still very young as a distinct category, but if there are "foundation" works, Alexie's is surely one of them. The book is semi-autobiographical and deals with issues of race and poverty in the life of a young boy growing up in the Pacific Northwest on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

I knew from the moment I finished the book that I'd read something powerful and wonderful, but when I got to class, I still couldn't shake the feeling of being deeply rattled by it. I piped into the discussion a few times, but the bulk of my thoughts about the book waited until after class when I was talking to one of my friends.  I asked her one thing in particular that was really bothering me.

"Where's the closest reserve to Pittsburgh?"

She paused and thought for a moment. "You know, I'm not sure," she said at last. "I think probably upstate New York. There aren't any nearby."

At that point it clicked as to why, though I enjoyed the book, it hurt in a more personal way than it seemed to strike my East Coast classmates. I knew where Spokane was. I could point to it on a map. And further to that, I had friends and family who had lived through situations similar to the ones portrayed by the book. Of course I had other friends of First Nations decent who lead very different lives, but those who had experienced similar trials to Alexie's autobiographical main character weighed on my mind that night. It had been, for a moment, too close for comfort.

It wasn't until after talking through the book with my friend that I really came to an opinion on it. I love the book now. It's both profoundly tragic and hopeful. It's funny and serious. It's also deeply unsettling.

I don't think that was an accident. Alexie's story was not only something intensely personal, but also one that a lot of people in North America have the luxury of ignoring. There are very few reserves in the Eastern United States compared to the West, and so - tragically, but understandably - First Nations issues are rarely top of mind for a lot of city slickers (and believe me, I can be guilty of this too).

I certainly don't think I had the market cornered on being unsettled by the book. A number of my classmates were. They expressed how glad they were that the book existed, because even though the story took place in America, it was so beyond their experience.  Perhaps the best thing about it is that it's a book that prompts questions, which I think is exactly what Alexie wanted. It's the kind of book that demands to be talked about. I'm not sure you could read it and then go "aw, ain't that nice?" and move on to make a cup of tea.

There are often two competing horses trying to pull your chariot in art. One is trying to point out what's wrong with the world and the other just wants to have fun. I've seen them characterized as escapism versus realism, but that has never seemed right to me. Cat videos on youtube are highly escapist, but their humor completely depends on their realism. (SEE? Cats really ARE that dumb!) To me, the real dichotomy is whether or not a book is escapism or... unsettlism. (Can that be a thing now? I want to coin a phrase. Let's make that a thing.)

Art can either comfort and entertain you or prod you to DO something. Maybe think or empathize or vote or something! Just something! An unsettling book is one that does not want you to "relax" but to wake up. An escapist one wants to entertain you and make you happy. It doesn't care what you do next. Granted, most art tries to achieve a mixture of both. Something that offers no call to action can seem trifling and unimportant while something that gives us no entertaining escape can become so unpleasant, we want nothing more than to toss it across the room.

Alexie accomplishes a fair degree of balance in his novel. The story falls more on the "unsettling" side of the spectrum, but it's offset by a bunch of funny pictures and a humorous narrative voice. He offers the reader that "spoonful of sugar" to go with the medicine.

Still, I've been thinking lately about a pair of other books that did not walk the line so neatly as the The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian did. (I mean, just look at the title. It screams non-committal!) They're both older books, and they both firmly planted their feet on either side of the dichotomy.

They are:

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

One of these books I love. One of these books I hate. But I'm (grudgingly) starting to admit to myself that both have been incredibly important in my development as both a reader and a writer.

So the next post I put out is going to deal with Jerome and his rampant silliness. Following that, I'll tackle Hardy and the depress-fest that is Tess. Maybe by the time I talk this one through, my opinion of it will improve.

So stay tuned, readers! And in case you were waiting for the final word, yes! Consider The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian heartily recommended.