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What a Terrible Way to Begin a Novel! But I Love It


Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator begins with a description of Dillsborough. Might as well call it Dullsville.

Trollope explains that Dillsborough county has no special landmarks, the village is small, the populace is mediocre, the curate doesn’t preach well, the church is shabby, the prominent families are not that prominent, and no one is notably prosperous. Nothing of interest. He goes on to describe the family history of several generations of the Morton and the Masters clans. Somewhat complex, as most family histories are, but devoid of dramatic tension. Dillsborough is dull. The residents of Dillsborough are dull. Ho hum. Is there a Seahawks game on TV? I’m not a football fan, but when there’s nothing better…


Why would anyone want to read this book? Well, I, for one, love it. I’m reading it a second time now with an online Trollope reading group. If you like Trollope, join the group. It’s informed, witty, welcoming, and civil. If you like Trollope, you’re one of us.

I bought a copy of The American Senator in the book department of Harrods on a business trip to London twenty years ago. A few years before, I received Trollope’s headliner Barsetshire and the Palliser series as a premium for joining the New York Review of Books book club, read, and enjoyed both series, but I had not read much else of Trollope. I was surprised at Harrods’ range of Trollope titles. I came home with as many of Trollope’s less well-known books as I could cram into my roll-aboard and read them all soon after.

I am in the straits of interesting a literary agent in my own novel and have read more about how to construct a compelling story than is likely good for anyone. Trollope breaks all the so-called story rules in the first three chapters of The American Senator.

Henry James complained that Trollope talked to his readers too much. He does that in the first few chapters of The American Senator. When a little interest sparks, the omniscient narrator informs us more will be said later about this person or that place, so we best not trouble our little heads about it. Today, critics would cite Trollope for reader abuse if such a thing could be done, but they would be wrong. Anthony Trollope was no fool. When The American Senator was written, he was a seasoned novelist with his craft well in hand. He was economical and he knew how to keep his story lines straight.

An omniscient narrator is somewhat rare these days, but it’s one of Trollope’s strengths. His narrator is a character speaking in the first person. The narrator is not an active participant in the story line, but he is a distinct and appealing personality. The reader hears the narrator’s voice as he tells the story and his role is as important as any of the plot characters. At times, I suspect that Trollope is offering us an unreliable omniscient narrator, if such a chimera can be permitted. I don’t question the omniscience of the narrator’s knowledge of events, but sometimes I catch a hint that the narrator’s commentary is designed to raise the reader’s hackles rather than represent an interpretation that Trollope, the author, believes is true.

From the day I started reading Trollope, I was amazed at Trollope’s descriptions of people and places that are fiercely remote from my experiences as a farm boy and software engineer, and yet somehow as familiar as neighbors across the line fences when I was growing up. The first chapters of The American Senator exercise that draw on me. Trollope’s descriptions are perfectly scaled to yield a sense of living community. In The American Senator, he adds piquancy to familiarity with the observations on Dillsborough society from a bizarre apparition from a sister planet in a distant galaxy, an American Senator from the imaginary state of Mikewa.

By the time Trollope wrote The American Senator, he was an experienced novelist and author; critics like me should not kid themselves; he knew exactly how far he could go before events had to begin to pop. And he knew how to build a setting to turn pops into explosions.

Trollope exercised some brinkmanship in these three ostensibly dull beginning chapters. The American Senator is anything but dull as the narrative rolls out and the story is enhanced by its contrast with a seemingly dull backdrop. He risked putting impatient readers off, but Trollope was saying “See, even in this dull place, life is intense and dramatic.” The seasoned master novelist takes readers to the edge of boredom, plays them with telling details, then yanks them back like a fly fisherman luring mountain trout.

The first three chapters of The American Senator are clearly not the failure predicted by modern novel writing rules or Henry James’ scolds. And I don’t accept the snide explanation that Victorian readers were starved for entertainment and therefore willing to suffer boring introductions to overly long novels. These chapters are successful for a significant swathe of readers of any era including the digital network age of the twenty-first century.

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Matt Goldman’s The Shallows

The final chapters of Matt Goldman’s The Shallows are amazing. I won’t reveal them, but they add a gracious note to the chaos of current affairs.

Mystery stories restore order: a crime is committed, the order of life is perturbed, the detective sets out to uncover the disorder and see that justice is done. In the process, the reader learns something about the causes of the perturbation, the meaning of justice, and, often, an encouraging sense that with the aid of the detective, the world will be, to some degree, restored. The best mysteries are those which both address the disorders of the time when the story was written and also touch something universal and timeless. For me, The Shallows is one of those.

As a mystery story, The Shallows reads well. Lots of punishing action, the characters are unique, yet relatable, the plot is well-constructed (surprising, but reasonable) and the setting is compelling. However, I found the beginning slow to get into; the prose was plain, choppy, generally lacking profluency, and I considered setting the book aside. But about 20 pages in, the story caught and carried me through to the end. Either the style changed, or I got used to the style. I don’t know which, but I am glad I kept on reading.

The setting is Minnesota summer: hot, humid, and proudly flyover chic. Nils Silver is a private investigator and former police detective. A lawyer is found drowned in a suburban lake. Everyone— the drowned man’s wife, his employer, and the suburban police force— wants to hire Silver to investigate. His relationship with the police is complex, not the usual blind antagonism. Silver’s cool industrial loft apartment is inadequately airconditioned and blazing hot. At every opportunity, Goldman upends the hackneyed order of events and emotions, giving the book a pleasantly askew texture.

The book is the third in the Nils Silver series. I confess that I have not read the preceding two books, but after The Shallows, they are on my reading list.

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Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi

I read Hermann Hesse’s Nobel Prize winning novel, Magister Ludi, also known as The Glass Bead Game, for the second time last week. I read it for the first time when I was about twenty. Now I’m seventy. The book is more relevant today than it was at the height of the Vietnam War and in the midst of the social upheaval of the 60s and 70s, but the book read better fifty years ago.

I read it first while still an undergraduate studying Chinese philosophy and literature. My German was better then, and I had read a few of Hesse’s German essays and stories in language classes. The book was popular among my friends in those days. I tried to read a German edition from the library, but I gave up and bought a translation. I remember I liked it, except that I thought it contained rather superficial references to the Chinese book of divination, The Book of Changes (I Ching), which was popular at the time. Not much else stuck with me, except a good feeling about the book.

In the intervening years, Hesse has gotten his share of criticism for misogyny and protagonists who only appeal to adolescents, and I agree.

First, Hesse needed a disciplined editor. The mass-market paperback I read last week, the same one I read in 1970, has over 500 pages of small print and narrow margins. It should have been cut to 300 pages.

I usually read for pleasure slowly, mulling over books as I read them, but I found myself skimming because Hesse used too many words, over-described, and repeated unnecessarily. Joseph Knecht, the protagonist of the novel, was a sincere and meticulous educational bureaucrat. We don’t need to be told, shown, retold, reshown in long paragraphs that seem to repeat every few pages. The Magister took too many contemplative walks and rhapsodized too much on the pleasures of nature. The novel was published in 1943 and set in the future 24th or 25th century. But it is populated with peasants, aristocrats, townsmen, and heating systems from a pre-Renaissance monastery. The pages of description do little to illuminate this odd setting.

The glass bead game is a made up game that required erudition and connoisseurship to play. The protagonist, Joseph Knecht is the master of the game. After striving to become a perfect academic manager, teacher, and player of game, and reaching the pinnacle of delectation of music, arts, philology, and mathematics, Knecht gives up his position, resigns from the order, and dies trying to outswim an adolescent in freezing lake.

As I read, I felt compelled to consult Hesse’s biography. I had to know if Hesse knew what he was talking about. Had Hesse ever experienced anyone like his hero? I haven’t known any bureaucrats who came even close to that mold and I’ve known hundreds. For me, the character and plot was unrealistic and hard to believe. In Hesse’s defense, realistic heroes have never been a requirement for a good story, but I could not empathize with Joseph Knecht.

And what about women? The story is about an all-male, celibate, elite order until we get to the final section, three short lives set in various eras and locations. The first life describes a matriarchy dominated by men. In the other lives, the women are spiritless toys. I suspect that Hesse might have been comfortable hanging with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein who Hesse would have been happy to allow to buy his way into The Glass Bead Game, the way Epstein bought his way into MIT Labs.

I’m being negative—justifiably, I believe—but the book also raises important points and is worth reading. If you can ignore the male elitism (which is not easy), the story is about educated universal culture, populist nationalism, and governance, which is on many people’s minds today.

Hesse was born and grew up in Germany, but he spent much of his life as a Swiss citizen. Although he helped many Jewish and other dissident intellectuals out of Nazi Germany, he was not outspoken in opposition to Hitler’s Nazi state. Nevertheless, this book is clearly critical of nationalist fascism and was banned in Nazi Germany. In The Glass Bead Game, all the misogyny and juvenility aside, Hesse raises questions about the relationship between the rise of totalitarians like Hitler and educated elites that are relevant and pressing today. I didn’t see that fifty years ago.

I compare the Bead Game to Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and J.K. Rowling’s Ministry of Magic. They all depict elites confronting forms of unreasoning and amoral nationalism. I doubt that The Glass Bead Game, due to its prolixity and dated misogyny, will ever be read popularly like Tolkien and Rowling, but it taps some of the same electricity and it carries a message that is more apt today than it was in the 60s and 70s when it was popular among young intellectuals.