Reading what we don’t enjoy - 1

I have recently begun to think about the experience of reading and to interrogate myself more fully about how I feel about reading books I don’t enjoy. I’m not here talking about badly written books, in fact I am talking about exactly the opposite. I am talking about extremely well written novels, particularly.

Of course most readers during their lives read difficult books, and books about extremely uncomfortable and unpalatable subjects, generally non-fiction books about areas we wish to educate ourselves about in order to formulate and hold an opinion. However, how do we feel when a novel we read leaves us unsatisfied, despite the fact that we can clearly see that the writer has great skill, clear intention and has very probably succeeded in achieving what he or she set out to do?

Sometimes this distemper I have with a novel may simply evolve out of the fact that I have absolutely no empathy for the characters represented. For me, empathy, if not ‘like’ is important in at least some of the characters. This is not to say I am always seeking characters that reflect me, or an idealised version of the person I would like to see in the mirror.

Nor is it that I demand characters with whose opinions I will agree. After all the pleasure of reading is very much about finding oneself in original and often different environments and situations to those we experience in our own lives, about learning to understand through fantasy the lives and imaginations of others. It’s about being able to understand their personality and life arc, and, despite that they themselves may not, to understand their motives, or to understand something about not always being able to understand their motives. And yet, even being able to achieve the above criteria, sometimes I am not satisfied.

I have recently read two novels that fall into this category by the writer Joyce Carol Oates, a novelist for whom I have great respect and from reading whose work I often achieve great satisfaction. In the past she has taken me to all kinds of places, offered many satisfying, pleasurable and often uncomfortable situations, and yet in these two instances I have had real difficulty in obtaining pleasure from the work I am reading. In ‘The Tattoed Girl’ it very much was about finding characters that for me had little saving grace, despite that I understood what had led certainly some of them to behave in the manor they did.

In the novel I am currently 2/3rds through, ‘Little Bird of Heaven’ I can’t say that it is lack of empathy, although the characters involved are very dissimilar to anyone I know or may wish to spend much time with. I do think that some of my discombobulation may be because there is a great deal of repetitiveness in the novel. And yet I can clearly see that this is an intentional part of the construction of this novel, as Oates is engaging us in how we perceive over a period of time, how what we understand can and often does change, so by revisiting incidents and feelings at different ages, the layers of knowledge and understanding shift and change. And may even become less clear, rather than more transparent. The repetitiveness is also created by the fact that the same actions are perceived by different individuals in the story.

I don’t yet know whether this constant repetition is what has alienated me from my reading pleasure zone. In this instance my investigation is still ‘live’, but I am interested to hear what others think about not enjoying a particular book.