Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett
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| Originally published: 1748 Acquired: October 2008 Read: December 2023 |
I am a Victorianist, so I have no issues with reading texts many others find old or dull. However, I am beginning to think that some kind of switch was flipped around 1820 or so that made literature become good—presumably this was done by Jane Austen. This reminded me a lot of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (published a year later), in that it goes on and on and on and on without stopping. The focus on interiority that makes the novel the novel just isn't here yet, but even a lot of the dialogue comes in the form of reported summaries of conversations. It's like listening to someone tell you a story, only the teller is an older relative and they have no clear point and no clear direction and soon all you can do is nod politely and hope it doesn't go on too long. But of course it does. Fool me once, eighteenth-century picaresques,* shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Hopefully I am not fooled into picking up a third one.
* Everyone calls this book a picaresque, but David Blewett, editor of my Penguin Classics edition, goes to great pains in his introduction to establish that it's not one.
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