Besides the usual shit-ton of memoir (Foreskin's Lament, which is a really funny and horrifyingly accurate portrait of the type of mental torture I've been putting myself through for the past few years, and by "few" I mean "decades' worth"; also Portrait of the Addict As A Young Man, totally salacious but with beautiful writing), I've been reading a lot of Dickens lately, sort of going back and forth between the two genres. I'm into the less popular novels now, the Martin Chuzzlewits and the Dombey and Sons -- the thicker the better, I find. I like to see a longitudinal study of several intertwined lives over ten or twenty years; I like watching the kids, with their terrible parents or their wonderful uncles, find their way to adult personalities, systems of morality. It's like watching six seasons of a really good cable drama, one episode after the next.
That's what I want to do in fiction; show characters evolving episodically over a long period of time. Let you experience everything the character does and thinks and feels as a kid, and watch how those experiences shape that person, understand every one of their thoughts and actions from the inside. But it's not children's literature, or maybe it is. I was at a picnic with a four year old not too long ago, and I showed her my copy of Our Mutual Friend, showing off how many pages it is. "Yeah," she agreed, "but it's got pictures."
Charles Dickens helped found Urania Cottage, a home for what they used to call fallen women. Then he put characters based on some of them in his books. Does that make him an exploiter? Am I?
OMG... no, wait, not an appropriate exclamation considering the high-brow subject matter.
Oh, my God... better.
I thought I was the only closet Dickens reader. Another reason I adore you, Janice.
Posted by: Kirsten | Sep 22, 2010 at 09:26 PM
That's so funny. I debated back and forth . . . Dickens or Austen? Dickens or Austen?
I decided Austen and next year I'll be dedicating the year to reading Austen but Dickens is next in 2012. Not that I can't read both but next year has other issues and between Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and Dickens 2012 may prove to be the most fun I've had reading in ages.
Of course, I have to finish everything before 12/26, right? I mean, I wouldn't want to be in the middle of something really great only to end up facing the apocalypse and going, "But I have 100 more pages to go!"
Posted by: Satia | Sep 23, 2010 at 08:15 PM