By Dr. Jeanne Colleran
I often get asked for reading recommendations at this time of year, when book clubs draw up new discussion plans. I take my cue from hearing about what they have already read, but I invariably slip in something I have recently admired, often a compelling but challenging book.
I’m taking this opportunity to come clean and make the case for why reading should be difficult and even uncomfortable. I took my title from the name of a Yeats’ poem, where he — an often-difficult poet- decides he is done with writing hard plays or poetry. But Yeats never was, because he needed “difficult” art to express his sometimes contradictory but always complex reactions to his world.
Artistic complexity is needed to replicate, investigate or represent the complexity of human situations, perceptions, or emotions. It aspires to say something revelatory even as it concedes that it always falls short. Consider that there is no exact word for the pain one might be feeling – only an approximation, some far from adequate.
Reading is Good
My fundamental opinion is any reading is good, and reading for escapism, relaxation, club-membership, etc. should all be celebrated. One kind of enjoyment is that which genre readers prefer: they want more thrillers, more detective fiction, more science fiction, more romance, etc. Genre fiction, like all writing, has wide qualitative ranges within its formulas, and we all have our preferences – and exceptions.
I do not generally like time-travel narratives, but I do love Octavia Butler’s Kindred, which I would not have known about except for a member of my own beloved book club. Nor do I care for stories about zombies or monsters (not even the illustrated, deluxe edition of Pride and Prejudice and the Zombies), but then there is Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, must-read) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Nothing is really off limits, but as a teacher, I tried to show my students how they should at least argue the merits of their choices.
Reading Suggestions
Most often, I am asked for suggestions from people who love a good, solid story, one that isn’t a “beach book” or “lit-lite,” but that has substance without being too daunting. Top of my list for this kind of book are authors like Alice McDermot (an Irish American, especially The Ninth Hour), Ann Patchett (especially Bel Canto), and Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge): these writers are all very skilled, attuned to subtleties in relationship turns, and draw compelling characters.
Other candidates might include Delia Owens, Lucy Foley, and Kristin Hannah. Barbara Pym, Dorothy Sayers, Daphne Du Maurier, Murial Spark, E.M. Delafield are British writers with similar virtues. I have read all these authors and enjoyed them. And these novels get made into some pretty good movies and bingeable mini-series too.
In literary criticism, these books are sometimes considered “middlebrow literature.”
Virginia Woolf
That may sound kind of offensive, and it was meant to be insulting when Virginia Woolf used it in a letter she wrote to the “New Statesman” in which she assailed middlebrow readers as “busy bodies who run from one to the other with their tittle tattle and make all the mischief.” Warming to her theme, she called us “bloodless and pernicious pests.”
Woolf, like our friend Yeats, did not care for the middle class: remember “September, 1913,” when Yeats described the middle-class as unheroic dullards praying and saving with “fingers in a greasy till.’? The middle-class threatened Culture with a high C.
But like Thomas Mann, who feared the demise of the great German literary tradition, Yeats was tempted by fascism. Woolf, much more suspicious of aristocrats and a vocal champion of women’s rights, still did not see how and why middlebrow fiction was (and is) primarily written by and for women.
Today “middlebrow” is not a widely used term, but it is certainly no insult. Rather it is a nod to a fictional enterprise with its own social power and influence.
“Literary fiction” is the term used more often that ‘highbrow” to describe works that the modernists, like Woolf, would have praised as difficult, ambiguous, experimental in form, polyglot, and referential. They were also called “masterpieces, “ a term also retired for its implicit male reference and for its view that a work of fiction is shaped completely by its author, with its meaning independent of its reader.
Literary Fiction
Importantly, this kind of writing challenges readers to identify why some kind of stylistic innovation (including innovative realism) is necessary to convey meaning(s). This innovation does not mean that the books are necessarily abstruse or unapproachable, though some may be (looking at you Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis). It does mean they require some effort.
You, dear reader, must identify and see the solution to the problem of representation. This is the effort that makes reading not only pleasurable, but of the highest intellectual, social and ethical practice.That sounds like a big claim. It’s a true one.
So here are three books by contemporary authors that repay every effort and are on my list of recommendations this year. Well, they are always on my list of exceptional artworks.
The Vegetarian
This slim book by the Nobel prize winning South Korean writer, Hans Kang, tells the story of a woman who refuses to eat meat or to explain why, except that she had a dream. It is told in three parts, and each part describes how her refusal affects a key familial relationship.
Yes, her behavior gets more bizarre. Because she refuses to explain (or won’t be listened to), our attention is trained on the self-interested reaction of others.
The Metamorphosis
The germ of this narrative is at work in Kafka’s great story, The Metamorphosis. I co-taught Kafka’s story at the Lerner School of Medicine to the MD/PHD students as part of a medical humanities course. In that section of the class we read texts that helped think about how to assist resistant, constrained, or non-communicative patients – or non-supportive family members. The point here is that doctors – and the rest of us humans—must attend to the silences, and literature can show us how to try to decipher them.
Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee is another Nobel prize winner. As a South African, he wrote during the height and aftermath of apartheid, but unlike his great contemporary, Nadine Gordimer, his approach largely eschewed realism. Rather, in his distinctive construction of nearly parabolic tales told against identifiable historical circumstances, Coetzee examines how every kind of imposition deforms what it encounters, whether it be it through political oppression, such as de jure and de facto racism, or through an entitled control of bodies made to work for us or to satisfy a need.
Life and Times of Michael K and Foe
I considered two other novels by Coetzee—the Life and Times of Michael K and Foe before settling on this recommendation because Disgrace is more “accessible.” While Disgrace may be easier in some respects, however, you will still need to determine whether the remorse and contrition this disgraced professor and father assigns himself is a sufficient moral response. And you’ll need to decide if reparation for harm done is every really sufficient, or if political divisions can be ameliorated.
In keeping with the question of whether a work of fiction has useful or “pragmatic” applications, I recall being present at a discussion in South Africa of how members of President Mandela’s cabinet discussed Disgrace while the country was dealing with the limitations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Perhaps more leaders should be part of book clubs.
Beloved
I used to tell my students that I thought this novel should be required reading to be allowed to vote. I concede that is not likely to happen, but of all the writing that can help us to understand our shared American history, this novel by Nobel Prize Winner (and Elyria native) Toni Morrison is indispensable.
Like the other books discussed, Beloved is formally innovative. Its three distinct parts are shaped around the true story of an escaped slave, Margaret Garner, living in Cincinnati in 1873, who kills her two-year-old daughter and attempts to kill her other children, rather than have them all be returned to slavery. Set in 1873, the first section is comprised of 18 parts; the second of seven, and the third has three: the form mimics a date carved into a headstone.
Margaret’s (Sethe in the novel) action enunciates the moral premise of the book. If that premise is not appalling on its own, the depiction of the scarred back of the beaten protagonist, the madness of her grief, the return of her dead daughter, and the haunting of every moment of her life, so affects her entire local community that in the end they want to forget or “disremember” the horror.
Morrison will not allow that. Her novel is the absent monument to the unmourned.
The novel announces that goal in its opening dedication to the “sixty million and more” Africans who perished in the middle passage. Beloved refuses to permit forgetting: this story of African American terror and heartbreak will not be obliterated.
Structurally, a ghost story is always about the return of the unresolved. This is ours. Wishing you an abundance of happy and meaningful reading in 2025. Some of it “difficult!”
To read more of Dr. Colleran’s Irish Lit columns, click HERE
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Dr. Jeanne Colleran
*Dr. Jeanne Colleran, Ph.D is Professor Emeritus of English. At John Carroll University she served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and as the Provost and Academic Vice President. At Loyola University of Chicago, she worked with the Loyola Rule of Law Institute in the School of Law.A scholar of modern and contemporary literature, she has published a book, an edited collection, and some three dozen articles concerning literature and society. She has lectured in Ireland, South Africa, England, the United States, France, Canada, Belgium, and The Netherlands. She taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Irish Literature. She may be reached at [email protected]
