Where It Ran a Bit Long

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not my favorite Dickens novel. I kinda thought I was gonna really like it, too.

TBH, it's just too damn long with too many unnecessary side characters. You can say that with some justice about every Dickens novel, but this time I really mean it. Over a thousand pages, with probably only about 400 of them fun to read, with a dozen subplots, about half of which are properly tied up.

Dickens likes to dwell on the arrogant and ignorant and obnoxious and haughty and slimy characters, and I suppose that's his charm, for some. Sometimes I can enjoy his villains and lowlifes and antagonists, like Flintwich and Clennam's mother. For the most part, though, I like the good guys, the underdogs, the kind ones, the morally defensible people. Here, that's Little Dorrit (Amy) and Mr. Clennam and just a couple others. But instead of making the story about them--which it absolutely is, particularly at the end--we get Mr. Dorrit and his rotten daughter Fanny, and the tedious Mr. Gowan and Pet and Tattycoram and Miss Wade, and Mr. Merdle the fraud along with all the rotten folks at the Circumlocution Office. Then all those people fall away, sometimes moving the plot forward but mostly not, and we finally get back to the people that matter. Visually, the story arc is a curve at the beginning and a curve at the end with miles of scribbles in the middle.

IMO.

I support his rhetorical goals for the most part: describing the grief of poverty and futility of debtor's prison, the uselessness of government bureaucracy, the lure and false promise of unregulated investing and speculating, and the disgusting self-congratulations of wealth. I'm not as keen on duty as he is, but I can appreciate loyalty in any case, and humility, and patience, all of which he gives to a few characters like Little Dorrit and Mr. Doyce. I just wish their stories hadn't been shared with so many dull and pointless others.

Some things to like, anyway. But I'm not gonna read a Dickens novel for awhile. This wore me out.

YMMV.

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