I just finished the second volume of M. T. Anderson’s unprecedentedly brilliant The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. The book left me in a puddle of tears, which isn’t a spoiler, because I was crying about the nature of human existence, not about any particular plot point. (This post contains no spoilers, except for the spoiler that the book is great.)
In Hamlet, Polonius tells Ophelia that a certain kind of love is like a fire that gives off “more light than heat.” Extremely smart, intellectually engaged novels for teenagers are often criticized similarly–I’ve heard it said that Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Catalyst, for instance, is brilliant but cold. The same has been said of some of M. T. Anderson’s work. And, to use a lesser book as an example, some people feel that An Abundance of Katherines gives more light than heat. (This also happens with adult books–take, for instance, Richard Powers. Because he often writes about science and math, his work is seen by many as emotionally inaccessible.)
A novel that is all light and no heat is, of course, a failure. (*Cough* Atlas Shrugged *Cough*.) But ideas ARE hot, which is WHY people still read Atlas Shrugged. Novels that challenge us to read well are not pretentious or overly stylized or ostentatious or too difficult for normal people: they are instead trying to show us the truth about ourselves and our communities. Because the truth is complicated and riddled with ambiguity and endlessly multivalent, so the books must be also.*
But it’s unfair to say that Octavian is a work somehow deficient in heart just because it is hugely intellectually engaging.** Octavian is that rare work of fiction in which the heat cannot be separated from the light. You don’t come across great new novels very often, books that–if they get lucky–could be read generations from now. Octavian is an accomplishment of that magnitude, although while reading the book, I was usually far too involved in it to contemplate its greatness. But now that I’m done, I can say: This is the best contemporary fiction I have read in a long time.
I know that when the book comes out in October, some readers will be intimidated by the length, or by the language. Don’t be. This fire is as hot as it is bright.
* Not categorically accurate. There are of course great works of literature that are small and/or simple. (Wemberley Worried comes to mind.) But that does not negate the accomplishment of a complex book that speaks profoundly about our complex selves.
** People often said this in various forms about the first book, including me, although I didn’t realize I was saying it at the time. (I said that I remained unconvinced the book would resonate with a lot of teenagers. My opinions about teenagers, needless to say, have changed a lot in the last two years, and in retrospect, saying that was both condescending to teenagers and unfair to the first book, although for the record I do think that the first book isn’t and couldn’t have been as good on its own, since Octavian is really one novel broken into two volumes.)
