Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Dense and unapproachable for the first half but moving and fascinating in the second, here's what makes the denouement succeed and what it tells us.

Victorian authors will never be remembered for concise writing (not counting Jane Austen, who preceded but, I think, anticipated the style of writing in its treatment of class) in narrative or in prose. Of course they often more than made up for it with their impossible erudition. Some of the most beautiful passages in the English language can be found in even the era's more humble classics, such as the proto-pulp thriller and class-conscious novel, The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins.

But I'm not here to talk about Collins. I'm here to talk about his much more admired and remembered friend, Charles Dickens and his novel Bleak House which took four arduous months to read.

I actually made it through both high school and college -- with a two-year stint as an English major -- without ever having to read anything by Dickens, aside from quickly crashing through A Tale of Two Cities.

That first experience -- that plucking of the blossom if you will -- was unmemorable and slightly uncomfortable. This is the great novelist of bildungromans and entangled plots? This is the amazing stylist of the English language? This is the unrelenting chronicler of the elite and the lumpenprole?

Perhaps I could not stand the sheer verbiosity of his writing. Dickens was paid by the word, and he was well compensated, judging by the thickness of his finished works. (Someday, should I ever own them all, I'll measure the volumes' aggregate volume and post it.)

The first 400 pages of the book introduces the major characters to us and to its own denizens -- introductions that begin innocently and, later, reveal inner motives and inequitable interelationships. Nevertheless, it is those initial impressions that defy the modern reader's expectation of drama at the onset. There is no clean explanation of the rules or a weighing of the consequences. Indeed, I could only read three pages per sitting, often repulsed by the lack of propulsion. Not until that 400th page does the novel begin an inexorable march to conclusion.

What Dickens loses in concision, he makes up for in clarity and correctness. His use of diction is first-rate. No passage ever remains neutral. (For more, I refer you to "Writing like the Dickens," an article by Thomas C. Renzi in the Feb. 2008-issue of the The Writer.)

Its structure is nothing short of brilliant. It is terrible, yet fitting, that Caddy Jellyby and her invalid husband, Prince Turveydrop, would have a deaf and dumb child, whose physiological defects mirror its grandparents' sins, for both Mrs. Jellyby -- mother of Caddy -- and Mr. Turveydrop -- father of Prince -- were oblivious to their family and life. They turned a deaf ear to remonstrance and held conversations of no lasting import, completing an inevitable arc from generation to generation.

And this is in the novel's minor characters.

What really makes the novel succeed, however, belies Dickens' reputation as a sentimentalist. Although Carstone wins the aprocryphal court case that has locked away his and his wife's fortune, he receives nothing -- due to legal costs -- and dies. Like how David Simon describes The Wire, Bleak House is, in actuality, a Greek tragedy -- an existential meditation on the forces of chance that can favor or align against those caught in the middle.

The bittersweet ending is an antidote for the ills of today's culture. Popular opinion on the decline of newspaper circulation likes to point to the Internet as the cause, but, in reality, it's our culture. We put celebrity news and gossip on the front pages because our readers have said our news hole is too full of death and destruction. Reality television has made a point of highlighting swooping saviors. And when we do write about current events, it is of little substance and reflection. It's an ostrich approach to the world, one that values the silver bullet over practical solutions derived from past mistakes.

There is no silver bullet in Dickens. Only sensibility, perserverance and luck.

Correction: Jane Austen is not a Victorian author. She died before the birth of Queen Victoria in 1837. The original post did not provide additional context in the first paragraph.