Whew! After taking a two week break, it feels kind of refreshing to be done with what I hope will be the worst book I read in what will be a shorter than normal reading year for me. I knew what I was getting into when I decided to start American book published), but I didn’t know it was going to be this bad. And bad it is. It is rightly compared to books like Gaddis’ The Recognitions and Gravity’s Rainbow for both its length and its complexity. But while those other two novels offer some enjoyment (even though I may not be knowledgeable enough to enjoy them, none of that was in this books aching pace and poorly structured sentences. Through every one of its pages, which felt like two or three, not once was I able to decipher or find a way into this books heart. But besides that, I couldn’t find any enjoyment in it as it moved along. A plot synopsis is impossible, even after looking through the book’s Wikipedia page both before and during and after reading the book, but at the very least I can tell it is about two people, Grace Kimball, a radical feminist and Jim Mayn, a journalist, who never meet but whose proximity to each other is filled with the people who make up the novel. To say this is a slog is an understatement, with many run on sentences that seem constructed to get you lost and makes you lose interest; the worst of these being the long “breather” sections, where the book’s action is observed by what I think are imprisoned angels. The shorter sections are the ones I found a smidge of entertainment value in, but overall, I found this to be a draining experience that scrambled my brain for all the wrong reason. I finished this book happy as I said at the start, not really because I read the longest American book ever published (maybe a little bit), but because I got to move on to books I’m sure are more exciting than this.
Rating: 1/5
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