Some years ago, I fell into a spirited argument about the greatest English-language novelist and novel. I declared for Charles Dickens and David Copperfield. Battling Dickens in the ring was Ms. George (Middlemarch) Eliot. Her corner man was Jim Finn, one of my esteemed predecessors at Commonweal. Meanwhile, promoters for Jane Austen, Henry James, Herman Melville, Virginia Wool (...)
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DICKENS’S NOVELS TELL HIS OWN STORY
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Wonderful! But if I had to choose my Desert Island Dickens, I think it would be Nicholas Nickleby, for all its wonderful and manifold exposures to life in so many forms.
Of course he is the greatest novelist in English! Might I mention Tolstoy, himself, called Dickens Enormous", Dostoiefski was amazed also. Even Nabokov thought Dickens, and to a lesser extent Austen, the best. Joyce was captured by ideas, Melville also, Woolf is to small in her interest, and James however genereous and trustworthy is one step below the very top of the pile. It is only the prissy who might deny it, and by the way Eliot was a very good third choice.
Confirming and underlining my own opinion of Dickens: I just finished, once again, "Our Mutual Friend," lots a writer's workshop would criticize it, no doubt, but really so full, so imaginative, so REAL... In contrast, I took some Times' reviewer's advice and downloaded "Baker Towers" by Jennifer Haigh. The reviewer praised the writing, and it's not bad, but the story is so tiny, so microscopic as to be almost nearly invisible, ditto the characters. Novelists have given up the Big Story and the plots that go on off the page and the characters that go on living even when you're not watching them.