I’ve come to notice a recent trend in my reading habits: there are certain books I am just not finishing.  The latest was James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I got so far through reading it and then just couldn’t be bothered to continue.  Before that, the same thing happened with William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and, before that, a rereading of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

The link between the three books is fairly obvious: they are all novels that employ a stream of consciousness narrative style.

When I first read Mrs Dalloway as a twenty-something, I really enjoyed it.  Now?  I found the stream of consciousness narrative threatened to send me into a state of unconsciousness.  Like the Joyce; like the Faulkner; I found it too self-indulgent and, ultimately, I wasn’t sufficiently interested in the narrator to want to spend a book-length period of time inside their mind.

Unlike the cocktail party scenario of being trapped in a corner with the room’s most tedious gasbag regaling you with accounts of their entire life history, here there was a ready-made solution to the problem.  Just shut the book.  Spent six years working in corporate finance for Morgan Stanley, you know.  Remove your bookmark and just simply close the pages.  Before which I was attached to a dot.com start-up in ‘Frisco.  As the first beads of sweat appear on your forehead.  Just return the book to the shelf you got it from.  California, good days.  Increasingly sticky under your armpits while someone else is eating the last mushroom vol-au-vent and you look around but there is no escape – Ah, ‘Frisco nights – hemmed in closer and shrieks of laughter that you cannot join where someone – everyone – is having more fun than you are – ‘Frisco nights – a sea of corporate finance spittle in your face and no one to throw you a life line – not Joyce; not Faulker; certainly, not Woolf.

Just shut the book.

© Fergus Longfellow

Fergus Longfellow thinks he might still be in time for a mushroom vol-au-vent.