Horizon

I’d never join a book group. Can’t bear making commitments I know I won’t keep. And I rarely form an intelligible opinion about any book on a single reading. Even after several readings, if fortune is kind and a position develops, articulating that position is very difficult.

If Mags were exposed to Hardy in the English equivalent of what I think of as high school, well then, yes, to find him anything but a monumental bore would be unnatural. But that’s likely true for many, many writers. Teenagers, generally, have the most tightly closed minds on the planet.

I explored Hardy in my early twenties, having a hungry little brain then. Walked away and stayed away until last week (that would be a thirty year hiatus, by the way). Now I’m excited about him again. I think the human mind opens and closes depending on where you are in life. When you turn fifty and start reading obituaries for people in their fifties and early sixties, and you visit your eighty-seven year old father who doesn’t remember you made him breakfast in the morning, you think, maybe I need to exercise the brain while there’s still a little time left.

You have to enjoy Hardy for Hardy. You shouldn’t read him and think, this is the way people should write (in fact, he has to be the worst influence for a budding writer). His plots border on contrivance and his style ventures close to elegant variation; yet the plots are not contrived and he is in full command of the language. He may have thought of himself as an heir to Shakespeare, and some ways it may be best to read the novels as stage dramas (but without the speeches). At least he should be admired for creating Wessex, a place as real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.