An email I sent to people I annoy with emails...

Don't ever ask me if I've finished Tom Jones (not that anyone asks me anything anymore) because I *will* finish it at some point, but it so strikes me as a shallow work (I can see why it got deleted from the roster of the Great Books of the Western World) that it is a strange feeling to *have* to finish it. The characters are cardboard and shallow, and the events of the novel are simply empty and repetitive and dull. There *is* understanding of human nature, but the novel itself as a work of art is severely lacking. Really, all the story is is something for Fielding to hang his comments on human nature on. You can *really* see that as a storyteller he is routinely going nowhere and ending up at empty dead ends, then starts in another direction for the same result. Thackeray wrote truly funny scenes to accompany his understanding of human nature. I can remember Vanity Fair almost complete right now, but I can barely remember what I've just slogged through in Tom Jones. Paul McCartney's song *The Fool on the Hill* has more meaning that the extensive story-within-a-story of the fool on the hill in Tom Jones. Seriously, you think he is going off on that tangent to portray an interesting character, but his story is as banal as you can imagine (and that is not the point Fielding is making, by the way, he just doesn't know what he's doing as a storyteller). I suppose it was unique for its time - the novel as a literary form, etc. - but I seem to recall that more commentators on it of his day kind of said, "Eh, there ain't much there..."

I know you can't say a classic work of literature is nothing without overstating the matter. Here, though, is a passage from a critic that I found to express my own take thus far:

***David Goldknopf has recently claimed that the digressive elements of the novel and the author's intervening role as a commentator "as a systematic procedure for upgrading the applicability and stature of his work, … signalize his failure to integrate intelligence and imagination." Similarly, Irvin Ehrenpreis suggests that such repeated appearances as those of Sophia's pocketbook and muff, or the attorney Dowling "imply that the main line of action has insufficient energy of its own to contain the numerous episodes of the story." Because of the symmetrical structure of the book, Ehrenpreis suggests, "one stops expecting development and tries to feel satisfied with a line of action that does not, in a cause and effect sense, lead anywhere."***

I'll finish it, and I'll get something from the effort, if only just a refreshed sense that not all classics hit the mark. Kind of like a famous symphony that nevertheless doesn't really have 'it'... It will highlight by contrast those that *do* have 'it'... - C.