In Defense of Difficult Books

A word keeps appearing in book reviews, deployed as if its meaning were settled and its verdict final: accessible. The novel is praised for being accessible; the poet, for making difficult material accessible; the history, for rendering its subject accessible to the general reader. And its shadow-twin does the condemning: a book is self-indulgent, willfully obscure, difficult — this last now functioning, in most review venues, as a euphemism for failed. Somewhere in the last few decades, without a vote being taken, ease of entry became the load-bearing virtue of literature, and I want to file a dissent before the doctrine finishes hardening.

Let me concede the obvious first, to clear the field. There is fake difficulty, and plenty of it: obscurity as costume, prose that is hard the way a locked empty room is hard — you force the door and find nothing inside but the author’s satisfaction with the lock. Everyone has been burned by these books, and the accessibility doctrine is, in part, scar tissue from those burns. Fine. Fraud exists in every currency. But the existence of counterfeit difficulty no more discredits the real thing than counterfeit money discredits money, and the current review culture has stopped checking — it bites every hard coin once and throws it away.

Here is the case for the real thing, and it rests on a single claim: sometimes the difficulty is not the price of the content. Sometimes it is the content. Take the standard example because it is standard for good reason — the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury, forty pages of broken chronology narrated by a man for whom time does not sequence. It is genuinely hard: readers bounce, I bounced, the paperback’s first chapter has ended more relationships with Faulkner than anything else he wrote. Now imagine it repaired — events in order, transitions signposted, an accessible Benjy. The exercise refutes itself. The subject of those pages is a consciousness in which order is unavailable, and the reader’s disorientation is not an obstacle to the meaning; it is the meaning, administered rather than described. Smooth the prose and you haven’t lowered a barrier to the experience. You’ve abolished the experience and kept the plot, which was never the point, of that book or — I’d argue — of any book that matters.

The same defense extends past the modernists. Difficult syntax in Henry James is late-Jamesian consciousness enacted, not encrypted; the thickets in Middlemarch‘s narration — try assigning it to a reader raised on accessible prose — are a mind moving at the actual resolution of moral life, which is not a resolution the paragraph-long chapter has room for. Even in nonfiction: a genuinely new idea often cannot be written accessibly on first contact, because accessibility means “continuous with what the reader already knows,” and the new, by definition, isn’t. Every reader who has worked through a hard book honestly knows the phenomenon: the difficulty was where the book was keeping its difference. What resists you is precisely what you don’t already contain.

And this is my real quarrel with the doctrine — not aesthetic but almost nutritional. A book that is perfectly accessible to me is a book made entirely of things I already digest: my vocabulary, my rhythms, my furniture rearranged pleasantly. There is a place for that; comfort is a legitimate genre. But a reading diet composed exclusively of the frictionless is a life spent shaking hands with yourself. The difficult book is the one offering material you cannot yet metabolize — and the work of metabolizing it, the weeks of being confused above your pay grade, is not the tax on growth. It is the growth. Nobody is surprised by this logic at the gym. Only in reading have we decided that resistance is a design flaw.

What would a healthier settlement look like? Not a swing to the opposite cult — difficulty-worship is its own vanity, and the man at the party who has read Finnegans Wake at you is not an advertisement for the practice. Just an armistice with two terms. First: reviews should say what kind of hard a book is, not whether hard is bad — is it hard like ice (technique required, rewards proportional) or hard like a locked empty room? That’s the useful information, and it takes the reviewer actual work to earn it. Second: readers should hold a small standing appointment with difficulty — one book a year, say, chosen from beyond the current frontier, read slowly, with a pencil, with the express understanding that confusion is the tuition and not the scam. Mine, this year, is late Beckett, and I am confused on schedule, right on the frontier, where the maps stop. I report from experience, this year’s and a lifetime’s: it is the only place the territory ever gets bigger.