Dickens for dyslexics

An oldie but a goodie from novelist John Irving, who as a teenager struggled with "undiagnosed dyslexia," quoted in the LA Times:

I read Charles Dickens when I was 14 or 15. It might be hard for many 14, 15-year-olds today to read Dickens. That language seems so old fashioned, if not exactly dated, to us now -- the amount of detail, the sheer complexities of those stories and plots. But those were the novels I read that made me want to write novels. If I had read, frankly, some more modern or post-modern novels at the time, I might have wanted to do something else. I've always been a fan of the 19th century novel, of the novel that is plotted, character-driven, and where the passage of time is almost as central to the novel as a major minor character, the passage of time and its effect on the characters in the story. Those old 19th century novels, all of them long, all of them complicated, all of them plotted. Not just Dickens, but especially Dickens, but also George Eliot, Thomas Hardy. And among the Americans, Melville and Hawthorne always meant more to me than Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. I'm not a modern guy.

That's telling 'em. All those people who moan that they were "forced" to read Dickens in high school and it was way too hard -- I'll bet the majority of them didn't have that kind of obstacle to overcome. If a dyslexic 14-year-old can fall in love with Dickens, I really don't think he's all that inaccessible.

Irving, by the way, wrote a fantastic introduction to my edition of Great Expectations (Bantam, 1986). I thought his take on the revised ending was way better than Dorothy L. Sayers's take, which is saying something huge, because I adore Sayers. But he liked the second ending and she didn't, so he gets my vote on that one.

Comments

[Rob Velella]

My respect for John Irving just took a leap up. I've found myself saying "I'm not a modern guy" many, many times. I've only read "A Prayer for Owen Meaney" by him but I didn't see too much of Dickens and Hawthorne; maybe a little Salinger... But, what do I know? I just think it's great he's a fan of the same century as me!

[Christy]

There's so much in Dickens that applies spot-on to life today. If his books could be taught in school from that point of view, maybe they would seem more accessible to high school and college students.

[Jen]

I'm just now reading Irving's "Prayer for Owen Meany", and I love his comments on reading "hard books." It's refreshing, especially in an era of "Shakespeare in modern English" and Dickens and Hugo abridged.