Kelly Clark, who has a more lively twitter feed than I'll ever aspire to, posted something cute about books remaining mysteries if they're never finished, which led to my recollection of a short thread in Speakeasy led by a journalist named Lynn, the typical suburban writer who probably believed my posting activity justified institutionalization, about abandoning a book. With maturity we learn not to feel guilty about it. I certainly do not when it comes to badly plotted commercial texts of the sort which made Jeff Bezos a modern oligarch (worrisome in my view).
I could name a slew of kindle franchise authors who make me puke, who deserve abandon just as readily as the poison of too much fructose in processed food diets, leading to the diabetic industry, which will be a growth industry for decades to come, but then there are troubling texts, sometimes post-modern, or classics not easy to classify, particularly philosophical novels, a term I do not like, but there are writers who use fiction loosely to explore things like hedonism.
My nominee for potential abandon by shallow American idiots is A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans was an important figure in the blossoming of Decadence as it culminated in the work of Oscar Wilde, the British Empire's most cultivated pederast, but to downplay Jois-Karl's interior examination of Esseintes' mind, the novel is little more than sensual indulgence-- and even Wilde tempered this by giving ...Dorian Gray a plot.
I do not know if, in fidelity to the text, Huysmans' chapter where Esseintes' tries to drive a man to commit murder was restored in the original French, but in the free kindle translation I read, I doubt it would have invigorated the story all that much, and in fact, Huysmans might have done better to write a treatise on hermiticism and pleasure. I finished the edition I have, as I must-- but living for the senses isn't as radicalized as it might have seemed back then, in all the contradictions under Victoria's long reign.
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