Our Mutual Friend

Big Chuck Dickens

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What an amazing novel. Despite having to write all the damn time in order to keep up the publication of the installments of this novel (three chapters a month for two years!), Chuckles never took a sentence off, and his status as the greatest master of the English language other than Big Willie Shakespeare is only reinforced by this, his last novel. The one thing that always bugs me about Dickens is his repeated habit of creating incorruptibly noble and selfless (not to mention hot) female characters, and we get one of those in Lizzie Hexam. On the other hand, her pops is bottom-of-the-river-fishing scum and her brother takes advantage of her generosity to scorn her once he has achieved his schooling, so her incorruptibility inspires more incredulousness than nausea. There is also remarkably little identifiably sexual attraction in the book, and certainly not identifiable sexual attraction between the good characters, which fell within the parameters of the Victorian taste at the time but strains credulity now.

But Dickens also gives us a psychopath, guttersnipes from both the low and high castes, Bella Wilfer the enchanting mercenary, Miss Wilfer the perpetually aggrieved, Jenny Wren the odd childlike thing with the keen wit, and of course the Veneerings, whose initial description in Our Mutual Friend makes an expletive of the word “new” and whose nouveau riche antics are easily recognizable today. (Especially the part where they buy a seat in Parliament without ever having visited the precinct they are supposed to be representing.)

Some people can’t deal with how long Dickens’s books are, but to me they feel like an enormously satisfying meal, consumed over the course of a month or so; he uses such a broad canvas that he can cover the whole range of human experience and emotion. I can’t possibly say how much I love this book. It scares me, it thrills me, it appalls me, it heartens me, it makes me feel both more in love with life and more emboldened to make it better for my fellow creatures. What more do you want?

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