It was a big influence on her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. JC: Jennifer Egan once told me she and her Brooklyn reading group began In Search of Lost Time the week of 9/11 and finished it seven years later.

Plus Proust gives you a rich social life, useful if it’s just you, the sane, the water, and that palm tree. The book I’d take to the desert island, because by the time you get to the end, it’s time to go back to the beginning and see what you’ve missed. The pace, the intensity and the beauty of the language never slacken as the novel goes deeper and deeper. Eloquent, funny, charming, laceratingly observant of the adults around him, curious, brave, and soon convinced that he is entitled to something better, Pip narrates one cliffhanger chapter after another. The gorgeous, inventive, witty and rhythmic sentences get hold of you in chapter one and don’t let go. It’s meant to make you want to know what happens next, and a big part of that is Pip’s voice. You could say it was meant for a time like ours, when-if we are honest-it’s a challenge for a book to keep us away from our phone. Do you think Pip’s first-person narrative enhances its complexity? If not, what is it?įP: The thing about the novel I keep coming back to is that it was written to be published in serial form and save Dickens’s magazine, which was about to go under.

No one had greater compassion no one has given us a fuller or deeper or broader sense of what it means to be a human being. We get to experience life in a dreary genteel backwater, at a moment when women weren’t allowed or expected to do much-and we don’t have to actually live there. I’m talking about these characters as if they were real people, which is part of the pleasure of Middlemarch. Lydgate must balance what he wants with what his wife wants he must choose between career and social advancement and doing the right thing. Which of the imperfect creatures in Middlemarch seems to you most morally complex?įrancine Prose: It’s a contest, because all the major characters are morally complex, except perhaps Casaubon, whom our heroine Dorothea marries Casaubon is such a pompous stiff, who cares about his complexities? Dorothea makes us see the vanity in wanting to be a good person, and Dr. She also was a genius at creating full-blown characters.

A few years back, Middlemarch came out first in a poll I conducted for BBC Culture of the 100 greatest British novels as voted by critics from the rest of the world. Eliot seems both Victorian and modern, with a sense of point of view that quietly undermines the realism of the novel. Pritchett, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Rebecca Mead.

Jane Ciabattari: The admirers of Middlemarch include Virginia Woolf, as you note, Emily Dickinson, V.S.

The Vixen by Francine Prose