Middlemarch

George Eliot has written one very good novel (The Mill on the Floss), one good novel (Middlemarch), one okay novel (Silas Marner), and the rest, well, those are much lesser fare. I hated Adam Bede, whose putative virtue Eliot tried to force down my throat as though she was going to turn me into pate, while Felix Holt was a dog's breakfast of novelistic tricks and plot twists that felt about as artificial as an American store-bought cake covered in Cool Whip.

There is no doubt that Eliot is clever, but I really wish there was more bite and anger in her work. Her characters are so tiresomely wholesome and conventional, with the "shocking" aspects of their personalities so yawningly dull - take Bulstrode's indiscretion that is revealed late in Middlemarch, which seemed to me such a petty thing that I don't really understand why he faced disgrace and exile. It would have been more interesting and realistic if a worse crime was revealed, and no one cared because he had bought off the whole time.

I didn't like any of the characters in Middlemarch. They were boring and selfish and provincial (which I guess is the point), but man, I do have to admire Eliot's skill in keeping all these plates spinning for eight hundred long pages.

The novel concludes with some references to Bunyan, but Vanity Fair this is not. ( )