It takes a lot for me to stop reading a book I’ve already committed to. And it doesn’t take much for me to feel committed to a book. The last time I stopped reading a book I’d been invested in for more than one line was this summer, when I suffered through 50 pages of The Slap before calling it and switching to The Goldfinch (review forthcoming).
With Bliss, I was often torn.
On the one hand, I found this book – the first by Peter Carey, an Australian author I love – plodding and tough to get into. I felt as though Carey was holding the reader at a distance, and I never really cared that much about any of the characters. On the other hand, the prose was so luscious and the book so enticing from an objective standpoint that it made it really hard for me to put it down.
The book itself tells the story of a man who has a heart attack and is pronounced legally dead for a handful of minutes. When he awakes, he convinces himself he is in Hell, and his philandering wife and (admittedly insufferable) children are not actually his, but rather stand-ins from Hell. He has his eyes opened to the fact that some of the products his ad agency represents cause cancer, and so he attempts to separate himself from them, causing his entire life to be upended. There is, of course, as in most books written by men with navel-gazing male protagonists, a manic pixie dream girl entity by the name of Honey Barbara, a hippie sometimes-whore with whom the protagonist falls in love.
There was a lot going on, and yet there was something about this book that I found hard to get into. The rules system that governed the book seemed shaky at best. There were a lot of themes (his grandfather telling these outlandish stories; the aforementioned Hell narrative; even the insufferableness of his children [which, incidentally, I found the most intriguing part of the whole book]) that never felt fully fleshed out. I wasn’t enjoying the book, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to stop reading it because I knew that what was being done in the pages – even if I didn’t like it – was well-done nonetheless.
But it did make me think quite a bit about what we expect of books. Are they entertainment or work? Brain candy or brain sustenance?
Bliss ended up being one of those books I’m glad I finished, and a book I’m really excited to talk to someone else about. That said, I’ll be hard-pressed to find someone, because I’m not sure I’d recommend it.