Tristram Shandy, Or An Example of Attention Deficit Disorder Among 18th Century British Authors

Why would anybody read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman? Probably nine out of ten folks who read Tristram Shandy these days do so as a course requirement in college. Well, I'm not in college anymore--so why would I read it?

Tristram Shandy is one of those books that I've known about for a long time and always sorta thought I'd get around to, but I wasn't sure when that would be. It could have remained in outer orbit, just drifting within my periphery now and then, for the rest of my life. But, I've been trying to read more English-novelists-that-aren't-Charles-Dickens-or-Thomas-Hardy lately. I read Thackeray's Vanity Fair a month or so ago, and it was good enough. What decided me on Sterne was seeing Shandy on one of those horrid little "books everyone should read" lists (the type that almost never contain anything in verse or anything earlier than Jane Austen, the lone exception to both typically being Shakespeare) and thinking "Well, I might as well get it out of my way."

I knew that Shandy wasn't your standard novel--that it was full of digressions and didn't get anywhere fast--but that didn't deter me; I figured it would make for an interesting read. I remembered CS Lewis mentioning the novel (if you can even call it that) more than a handful of times, so I rather associated it with Lewis, and his taste in books has historically been a good guide for my own reading.

Well, Tristram Shandy reminds me of what my three-year-old daughter said about celery: "It almost tastes good." The whole interrupting digression gimmick is funny at first, but eventually even Sterne seems to have gotten tired of it as he used it less and less going along. He threw in other silly things that I didn't often find funny. The more I read, the more I came to realize that Shandy was the 18th century equivalent of today's "dumb comedy," an American Pie or Scary Movie 25½, and I like it about as much as I like those sort of films.

Sometimes, Sterne appears to have been straight drunk while writing. The story doesn't go anywhere, and Sterne is writing as close to nonsense as seems possible while keeping up some semblance of meaningful text. And it isn't structured "nonsense" of the Carrollian type--it's disjointed blather. Oh, and while we're talking about unreadability, let's not forget that pages and pages in Latin. Mercifully, I don't really read Latin, so I was able to skip these sections. Unfortunately, Sterne always provided a "translation" to slog through.

About halfway through the book, things seem to have become increasingly dull. Once the narrator finally managed to tell about his birth (a third of the way into the novel), he spent more pages than was necessary on a not-entirely-amusing story about his accidental circumcision via window, and then somehow zipped to his making the Grand Tour of the Continent.

Somehow we got back to England, and I'm currently enduring the most uninteresting story about Tristram's Uncle Toby's romantic doings with some widow or other. *yawn* Is it more or less of a snorefest than all the bits through the book about Uncle Toby's obsession with model re-enactments of various sieges? It's hard to say. It's rather like when the optometrist asks you "Better or worse? 1 or 2?" Or maybe it's more like "Which of these piles of dog crap is least offensive to your senses?"

It's not unusual for me to think about what I'll try next the whole time I'm reading something. It's also pretty standard for me to keep an eye on how much further I have to read, even in something I really enjoy. But with Tristram Shandy, every other moment I'm distracted by plans for my next read, and I sometimes check how far I have to go after every chapter (which, by the way, are sometimes only a paragraph's length or less--I guess that sort of thing was considered funny in Sterne's day).

I suppose what reading Tristram Shandy has taught me is that I was right about the wasteland in British literature between Milton and Cowper (exclusive, obviously). Pope and Dryden and their lot are dull both in matter and meter, and the pretend novelists (who apparently had no concept of structure) are unbearable. I hope this is the last time I'll be tempted to give that era the benefit of the doubt and try once more to enjoy its literature. If not, I suppose I deserve the likes of Tristram Shandy for being such a fool.