More on Huck Finn—on the Facebook response

So I posted here about giving up on Huck Finn, and also on my Facebook page. That drew a lot of heated reaction, by people who loved the book.

My take on much of the response was essentially, No it did have a plot, because it was a character study, a commentary on race, a picaresque novel.

Exactly. It had all those wonderful things, which is why I gushed so hard in my first post about Huck. But it didn't have much plot, so my interest waned.

(But also, because it did all those other things extraordinarily well, and accomplished them in in the first 50 page. Then he continued covering similar ground with lots more incidents, none of which were very fulfilling for me, because I got it already, and he wasn't taking me any further in any way that I could detect.

I thought much of what this book gave me was glorious, but I feel I got what it had to offer awhile back. (It would have been great as a novella for me. For others, they probably wanted to savor it another 100 pages, which is fine for them, so it's great that we have lots of books.) I'm not rejecting it or calling it a failure or anything like that. For me, it just hit diminishing returns, and I'm moving on.

And actually, I have to go back and study lots of what he did more closely, as I really think it's going to help me with my gay soldiers book that I'm writing right now. But I really need an engaging novel to sink my teeth into at the moment, so I've plunged ahead into A Little Life.