Damning with faint praise

Janet Potter of The Millions writes about Bleak House as a "staff pick," which doesn't make much sense, as she doesn't seem to like it very much. One gets that impression when an author writes things like "You have to embrace Bleak House for what it is — a rambling, confusing, verbose, over-populated, vastly improbable story which substitutes caricatures for people and is full of puns. In other words, an 800-page Dickens novel." Or when she concludes, "But if Dickens is only trying half the time, you’ve still got an enjoyable book."

It never fails to astonish me that people can get Dickens so wrong. I mean, if you don't like him, that's one thing. But to assume that he's "only trying half the time" when the fruits of his hard, painstaking, incessant labor are on every page . . . words fail me.

Words didn't fail her commenters, though! It does a Dickensian's heart good to see how many of them leaped to the master's defense.

Responses

Nina

February 15, 2011

Um, wow. Backhanded-compliment-much?
What do people NOT GET about Dickens? He basically created a genre of his own (thus Dickensian) – he’s not trying to be 100% realistic. That’s like griping over a fairy tale and saying “Why did they put giants in this story? There *are* no giants in the real world (duh) and therefore this story is ridiculous.” 😛
And what’s funny is that Bleak House is probably one of his less confusing late-period books. And *every* Victorian novel is verbose. Bleh. At least the commenters stood up for him!

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Christy

February 15, 2011

Hooray for the readers!

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Marian

February 15, 2011

What Nina said…I don’t think Dickens was trying to make us believe that his “vastly improbable” stories were realistic. On the contrary, his books tend to use the improbable/fantasy to portray real-life problems and people. I also think that his books are far less fantasy than might appear at first glance. I’ve personally met or heard of people who remind me very much of Dickens characters. 🙂
“I can’t escape the impression that Dickens was just mucking around half the time…I wouldn’t want all of the books I read to be so meandering and indulgent, but it was nice, in this case, to sit back and watch Dickens amuse himself.”
And here am I (about 3/4 through Bleak House) considering Bleak House to be Dickens’s best book. 😛 Personally, and as a writer myself, I think his plots (however unrealistic) were very, very carefully mapped-out. TV shows tend to add subplots via tweaking the characters, but Dickens kept his characters (and the main plot) consistent.
This comment is turning out a lot longer than I thought, so I think I’ll stop here… 😉

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Gina

February 15, 2011

“TV shows tend to add subplots via tweaking the characters, but Dickens kept his characters (and the main plot) consistent.”
And I’m SO grateful for that. I hate shows that make the characters do stupid, out-of-character things just to try to get ratings up!!
Part of the integrity of Dickens — I might even call it the “sanity” of Dickens — is that he knows and respects his characters too much for that.

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Nina

February 15, 2011

^ ^
I agree with you, Gina, and I also agree with Marian. Seriously, in the last…year? I’ve seen so many people who remind me of Dickens characters it’s not even funny. There are kids who look like they could be described perfectly Dickensian. In fact, I think we’ve found a real life Mr. Guppy, seriously, with my sister playing Esther! My mother could be Aunt Betsey. I’m probably…Peggotty (though slimmer, lol)? In fact, I find Dickens’ portrayals to be quite realistic most of the time – perhaps people just aren’t ready to admit that they and those around them are quite so free of caricaturization as they think?
(Hey, that might be a good post – which Dickens character are you most like?)

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Selenia

February 15, 2011

I completely agree with you. In one of the prefaces of a Dickens book I have the author points out that maybe we (the reader) have wondered why we don’t know any characters like the ones in Dickens’s novels, then he writes that if we look around, we probably do. And I think he is right. Sometimes I find myself watching people and thinking about what a character they are. One thing that I agree with, in a serious way, that the article writes, is that nobody writes like that anymore, and I really really mean it. Nobody writes like Dickens anymore.

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