I spent the last couple of weeks in Spokane, where Spring has officially arrived. Chubby, gravid sparrows are everywhere and the marmots who live in the rocks of the riverbank have come out to gnaw on the wooden bits of my patio again. The Falls are already high and are supposed to peak early this year. The pleasant Spring feels like the prelude to a hot, dry, perhaps calamitous summer. Spokane has always felt more intimately linked to the wilderness around it than other cities and so the zoology and hydrology of the city feels more prophetic to me.
I finished Middlemarch just after sunset one night, sitting on the patio. Thanks to the pacing of a Hugo House class (taught by Kaelie Giffel, who was an incredible instructor, guide, and Socratic interlocutor), it had taken me almost exactly eight weeks. While on paper this is a generous pace (~100 pages/week), I had been worried initially that I wouldn’t be able to keep it up with familial and professional obligations and the denser prose that Eliot uses.
When I first started reading Middlemarch, I did have to adjust to Eliot’s style. The cadence and vocabulary she uses initially struck my modern ear as florid and unwieldy, but after a hundred pages or so I found that I’d adapted to the rhythm of her writing. As a result, I was shocked by how quickly I read some of the later passages of the book. I sat down for lunch one day and, engrossed in the plotline of Raffles extorting Bullstrode (the character names are also of their time), dashed through 40 pages by the time I’d finished my burrito.
As part of that adjustment process, I was also surprised to learn just how delightful I found certain parts of the book. The opinionated narrator, who is a strange, impossible blend of omnipotent and clearly human, has a surprising wit at times. It’s this wit, in fact, that was most at fault for me shedding the my postmodern lens and thinking of the narrator explicitly as Eliot in some passages. Even small asides, such as referring to a Maltese puppy as “one of nature’s most naive toys” betray irrepressible opinions and personal style in a role that I’m accustomed to being more neutral and narrowly focused.
The psychological depth of the novel was also revelation to me. Even knowing it by reputation ahead of time, the thoroughness with which I got to know some of the characters was incredible. I saw in various characters shades of people I’ve known and loved, and yet still each character was completely their own. By the end, it was hard not to feel a friendly affection towards many of them. They seemed so vividly human to me that I felt I knew their (many) foibles as well as my own or my friends’.
This is perhaps less of a review of Middlemarch than of an endorsement to absolutely go and read the intimidating book that you’ve felt you “should” or want to read. It turns out, the reputation of grand old art is often well-deserved. I also highly recommend Hugo House’s courses, and Kaelie Giffel as an instructor if she elects to do another section of the course again in the future.