A Guide to Reading

There is a novel that most American readers have never heard of. It was published in 1965, took eighteen years to write, and runs to 1,198 pages. Anaïs Nin called it the American Ulysses. The New York Times compared it to Joyce and Melville. It has been out of print more often than in it, praised extravagantly and then quietly set aside, the culture moving on the way cultures do when something is too large and too strange to metabolize quickly.

The novel is Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young.

If you have never heard of it, that is not a failure of your attention. It is a fact about what American literary culture decided to remember and what it decided to let go quiet. This guide is, among other things, an argument that the letting-go was a mistake.

Here is what I want you to know before you begin: this novel is not difficult the way difficult books are difficult. It does not punish you for arriving without a degree or a reading list. What it asks for is a different kind of attention than most novels ask for, one that is slower and more patient, willing to let a sentence return and find it changed, willing to stay with an image longer than feels strictly necessary, willing to trust that the not-resolving is the point rather than a problem.

This guide is here to help you do exactly that.

Each chapter entry covers the characters, what happens, the themes and symbols worth tracking, the passages most worth pausing on, and a section called "For the Curious" that opens outward into context and connection. You can read it alongside the novel, chapter by chapter, or come to it after a section when you need someone to say: yes, that happened, here is what I think it means.

You do not need to have read anything else first. You do not need to have any prior knowledge of Young or her world. You need only the willingness to give a very large and very alive book the kind of attention it was made for.

Young spent eighteen years writing this novel because the novel took that long. It is worth the time it takes. I have read it five times and it keeps changing on me, which is the mark of the thing that knows more than you do and is patient enough to wait for you to catch up.

Come in. The door is open.