For a long time now, I've always held my own private antifada against Hemingway. I did not like him throughout high school, even though I had been assigned to read his work several times. I felt that he left too much up for grabs in his work, and the repetition of only a few themes in several of his novels made the reader feel as dizzy and drunk as many of his main characters. Yet, the more I read from him, and the older I get, I suppose his work, though minimalist, is not terrible. He leaves many questions up in the air as he writes, and he invites the reader to participate almost as much as he does in the works. Short stories like "Hills like White Elephants" and his book, "A Moveable Feast" has made me appreciate his work a lot more these days.
It's Melville I can't stand now. Why is it absolutely necessary to have a book of over a hundred chapters about whaling? I'm sure, with the recent surge in interest of commercial fisherman and the crab industry, like Discovery Channel's long running series, Deadliest Catch, that there would be a few more select readers of the fishing genre, but I am not one of them. I even grew up near a port and I know somewhat first hand that there is not that much to write about! Not enough, anyway, to fill a hundred chapters. And while I know that this work is a classic, and is well regarded by critics all over, I must say it reminds me of a guy I knew in high school who wrote great short stories, but woe to the person who wished to read his novel.
It was over four hundred pages long, and the first three chapters were, apparently, about some pseudo historical explanation of why the book needed to be so long in the first place.
As a fellow writer, and a poet, I cautioned him on knowing that his audience wouldn't possibly sit still long enough to read three chapters of prologue, and urged him to shorten it to one, even if it was an extremely long chapter, it would infinitely be better than three. I don't know if he ever did, but I do recall my wife- then girlfriend at the time- saying that he had passed around the novel in her English class and it had gotten longer since before.
Know your audience, and what they can tolerate. And I don't know if it's just me, but Melville is not one of those for me.
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I cannot stand Melville either! I think it is not just the whaling aspect of the writing but the writing itself.. It sounds like scripture! As if Moses were telling us about whaling! Moses knows nothing about whaling!! Jonah, maybe, but Moses, no.
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