You're Tearing Me Apart, Anna! A Perfect Novel and Why I Don't Review More

Winston Churchill was one of those people whose bevy of lyrical quotations comes with an unfortunate side effect: many quotes are falsely attributed to him. He shares this problem with Mark Twain, Albert Einstein and Woody Allen.

Among this list of falsehoods, Winston Churchill is believed to have said: “I am a man of simple tastes—I am quite easily satisfied with the best of everything.“ It didn’t quite come out of his mouth like that. Rather, Churchill’s friend F.E. Smith once made this description of him: “Mr. Churchill is easily satisfied with the best.”

This little anecdote about Churchill’s standards came back to me when I received a reader question.

Hi Elliott!

I notice you mostly review non-fiction books on your book review blog. Why don’t you review more fiction books?

Best,

[Name Redacted]

I’m glad you asked, classified reader. There are two core reasons.

First, if you consult the previous blog post about William Manchester’s biography of Douglas MacArthur, you’ll discover I have little patience with books that deviate from their subject. Novels, especially literary novels, have an unfortunate tendency to go off the rails..

I first noticed this problem when I wrote my dissertation on Tom Wolfe. Wolfe argued in The New Journalism and in a later essay that because mid-century novelists abandoned ‘realism’— trying to capture society as a whole—and instead deviated into self-indulgent non-plots, the novel has been suffering a slow death by irrelevance. Not only that, Wolfe continued, but journalists would supplant novelists as those who depicted contemporary American society in high art.

Wolfe was wrong about the journalists (long story for another day) but, in essentials, he was right about the novelists. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is considered THE seminal work of the 1930s, a perfect story representing the true horrors of The Great Depression. But cut ahead thirty years, there was no proverbial “The Grapes of Wrath for the 1960s“. Wolfe believed the lack of realism was the important ingredient, but I reckon it’s because most novelists became postmodern absurdists whose method of prose communication is so obscurantist that no reasonable reader could possibly understand it.

So while that’s one reason why I’ve grown tepid about reviewing novels, the other reason has to do with my baseline expectation.

Like Winston Churchill, I’m easily satisfied with the very best because my standard is the best novel ever written: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky—important caveat).

Sublime. Ain’t no other way to describe it.

The Best Novel Ever Written

When it comes to picking the greatest writer ever, even other candidates on the that short list nominate Leo Tolstoy. Anton Chekov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustave Fluabert, James Joyce all heaped praises on him. Virginia Woolf labelled him “the greatest of all novelists”. William Faulkner was once asked to list the three greatest novels of all time and he famously responded ‘Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, and Anna Karenina’. Isaac Babel paid him the highest tribute, saying “if the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy.”

Jesus.

Needless to say, when it comes writerly standards, Tolstoy is what any self-respecting novelist would aspire to. So what makes Anna Karenina a work of literature whose only competition is the King James Bible? The listed luminaries could all give a better answer than me, but as they’re all dead, it looks like I have to take a stab at it.

I believe the answer boils down to Tolstoy’s literary style and the way the characters move across the page.

The Characters

Tolstoy’s novels don’t employ one character, but dozens. It is a true ensemble rich, distinct people who collectively make the up the Russian society Tolstoy depicts. There’s the titular character, Anna, who is married to the the upper-class but boring Count Karenin. Anna is the literary embodiment of an existential crisis as she’s ‘made it’—good marriage, healthy son, high status—but she also feels a listlessness that is only cured on her meeting Count Vronsky, a calvary officer.

They begin an affair which results in a pregnancy and Anna’s subsequent ostracism from Russian society. The compounding rejections, failures and disappointments leave Anna spiraling into complete self-destruction. I won’t give away how it ends, but it is rather…vivid.

Anna and Vronsky aren’t the only ones in this novel. Arguably the more important character, at least in terms of airtime, is Levin.

Levin’s character arc is often viewed as a parable for Tolstoy’s own life and struggles with the Christian faith. Modern readers might be baffled by Levin’s country estate woes as they’re relics of a long-gone era, but if one looks past the particulars and views them in the context of pursuing self-excellence, he suddenly becomes a straight-laced, contemporary man. Not only that, readers will find his wooing of Kitty to be sympathetic as he’s awkward in love much as we all are.

Dozens of other characters appear and re-appear throughout the novel’s eight parts, but it’s those four—Anna, Vronsky, Levin, and Kitty—who are the leading cast.

Given that Anna is what we would now call a manic depressive, Vrosnky a 19th-century version of a military brat, Levin a proto-dweeb, and Kitty the silent female companion utterly hated by modern standards, they don’t exactly sound like the greatest characters ever written.

In the hands of an inferior writer, they absolutely would be. However, the key is in Tolstoy’s unrivaled depiction. Like any good novel, I will show and not tell.

For example, here is Tolstoy’s introduction to Vronsky:

“Vronsky had never known family life. His mother in her youth had been a brilliant society woman who, during her marriage and especially after it, had many love affairs, known to all the world. He barely remembered his father and had been brought up in the Corp of Pages. Leaving school as a very young and brilliant officer, he immediately fell in with the ways of rich Petersburg military men. Although he occasionally went into Petersburg society, his amorous interests lay outside of it.“

Never has a passive summary been so compelling. With tight economy, Tolstoy stylishly outlines who this guy really is, and gives readers a taste on what his family history of romantic relationships will do to him. Of course, this also an act of profound foreshadowing as Vronsky’s mother sounds a hell of a lot like Anna in this minimal description.

Vronsky, like all the characters, walks across the page as a real person whose life Tolstoy is showing us. My personal rule of thumb is that the best literary characters are so convincing in their story that you have a hard time accepting the fact they’re not real. Jane Eyre, Atticus Finch, Captain Ahab, Hamlet, all of them are so vibrant on the page that you feel like you know them. Every one of Tolstoy’s characters passes this test with flying colors.

It’s not only the characters who are home-runs, it’s the way Tolstoy depicts their actions. For example, this scene involving Kitty: “Kitty looked into his face, which was such a short distance from hers, and long afterwards, for several years, that look, so full of love, which she gave him then, and to which he did not respond, cut her heart with tormenting shame.”

And then there’s Tolstoy’s depiction of the scenery his characters are walking through: “Under the mist waters flowed, ice blocks cracked and moved off, the muddy, foaming streams ran quicker, and on the eve of Krasnaya Gorka the mist scattered, the dark clouds broke up into fleecy white ones, the sky cleared, and real spring unfolded. In the morning the bright sun rose and quickly ate up the thin ice covering the water, and the warm air was all atremble, filled with the vapours of the reviving earth. The old grass and the sprouting needles of new grass greened, the buds on the guelder-rose, the currants and the sticky, spiritous birches swelled, and on the willow, all sprinkled with golden catkins, the flitting, newly hatched bee buzzed.“

Then there’s his third-person omniscient narrator’s voice: “With a child’s sensitivity to any show of feelings, he saw clearly that his father, his governess, his nanny –all of them not only disliked Vronsky, but looked at him with disgust and fear, though they never said anything about him, while his mother looked at him as at a best friend.”

And his third-person limited with the POV of one character: “During her mother’s attack on her father, she tried to restrain her mother as far as daughterly respect permitted. During the prince’s outburst, she kept silent; she felt shame for her mother and tenderness towards her father for the instant return of his kindness; but when her father went out, she got ready to do the main thing necessary – to go to Kitty and comfort her.“

And his personal opinions woven into the text: “…the banal, stupid and, above all, ridiculous people who believed that one husband should live with one wife, whom he has married in church, that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest, a man manly, temperate and firm, that one should raise children, earn one’s bread, pay one’s debts, and other such stupidities.“

And his metaphors: “He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has plucked, in which he can barely recognize the beauty that had made him pluck and destroy it.“

And shards of wisdom that just appear out of nowhere: “…the pills of classical education contain the healing power of anti-nihilism…”

And, last but not least, the best opening sentence ever: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo, you’re making me look bad!

Point is, when you weave all of the above together into a coherent plot, the result is something so timeless, so peerless, and so beautiful that no novel written in the century and a half since could ever dream of matching it.

Though there is one possible exception.

The War and Peace Footnote

Tolstoy’s other major work of fiction is the jaw-dropping War and Peace. Set during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, War and Peace is the ultimate expression of human literature. Set over ten years, written 25% in French with accompanying footnotes, nearly thirty main characters and 24 lengthy philosophical anecdote chapters, you will constantly marvel at how one human could possibly write anything like it.

There’s no denying War and Peace’s power, but I still believe Anna Karenina is the better Tolstoy book. The lengthy philosophical excursions from the former book are thankfully absent. Anna Karenina is a more focused work and thus a better novel.

In case you doubt my opinion, Tolstoy himself believed Anna Karenina was the stronger novel because it was, well, a novel while War and Peace was an epic in prose fiction, a distinctly different art form.

Not that it matters, you should read anything Leo Tolstoy has written. Just make sure the translation is right.

Translations Matter.

One last footnote: when you’re picking up both Anna Karenina and War and Peace, you need to get the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. Their version deals with Tolstoy’s Russian weirdness the best out of any of them and convert the novel’s sublime qualities into English with superb beauty that, as mentioned, is rivaled only by the Book of Common Prayer.

Conclusion

After reading Tolstoy, all novels face standards none could hope to match, at least with me. I’m easily satisfied with the very finest and you should be too.