Bleak House
Dickens at his structural peak — a double-narrated novel built around Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, a Chancery suit so old the original litigants are forgotten and the costs have eaten the entire estate. Esther Summerson's first-person chapters alternate with an anonymous third-person voice closer to documentary than fiction. T.S. Eliot called it the greatest of Dickens's novels; Harold Bloom put it among the dozen greatest in English. Sprawling, furious, and structurally daring.
Esther narrates half the book and is “descended from heaven on a cotton candy cloud,” so relentlessly modest that readers say the novel “orbited a big black hole named Esther.” The cast runs past thirty, “all tangled together with complicated family lines,” and readers keep a chart beside them. The slowness is meant to mirror Chancery’s delays, which does not stop it being “padded out with waffle and meanderings” across a thousand pages. Good characters are wholly good and bad ones wholly bad, motives spelled out. The fog opening is where readers nearly stop, one saying it “made me want to gouge out my eyes.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
