How to read a dense literary novel without giving up

There is a particular kind of failure most serious readers know. You start a big, admired novel with good intentions. By page forty you are rereading paragraphs. By page ninety you are reading the same paragraph for the third time and thinking about something else. A week later the book is on the bedside table with a receipt sticking out of it, and a month later it is back on the shelf, faintly accusing you.

I have done this with Faulkner, with late Henry James and, twice, with Proust. I have also, on other attempts, finished all three and been glad I did. The difference was never willpower. It was method. Dense novels ask you to read in a slightly different way, and once you know what the adjustments are, most of them stop being frightening.

What makes a novel dense

Not every hard book is hard in the same way, and it helps to know which kind you are holding.

• Long, layered sentences. Henry James in his late novels (The Wings of the Dove, 1902; The Ambassadors, 1903; The Golden Bowl, 1904) builds sentences that qualify themselves again and again before they land. Salvatore Scibona's The End (2008) does something different but just as demanding: sentences that pile up place, weather and memory before they reach their subject.
• Shifting time and consciousness. William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) opens inside the mind of Benjy Compson, for whom past and present arrive together without warning. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) moves from mind to mind within a single dinner party, then skips ten years in a short middle section where deaths are reported almost in passing, in brackets.
• Sheer scale. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time came out in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. The difficulty is less any single page than the long patience the whole asks for.
• Refusal of the usual signposts. W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2001) runs in long, unbroken paragraphs of reported speech, with photographs set into the text and no ordinary chapter breaks. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (2004) is a single long letter from an old Iowa minister, John Ames, to his young son, and it moves by association, not by plot.

Each kind needs a slightly different tool. Here are the ones I use.

1. Set a page target, but a small one

The most useful thing I ever did for a long novel was to decide in advance how many pages I would read each day, and to make the number embarrassingly small. Twenty pages of late James is a real day's work. Thirty pages of Proust is a good evening.

Small targets do two things. They make it possible to keep going on bad days, which is when most abandonments happen. And they let you finish the day's reading feeling you have succeeded, which matters more than readers like to admit.

A page target also tells you the truth about the book. If you are reliably hitting twenty pages and could easily do more, raise it. If twenty pages takes two hours and leaves you exhausted, you may need to read differently, not more.

2. Read aloud when you get lost

Many dense novels were built for the ear. When a sentence defeats me, I read it aloud at a walking pace, and more often than not the syntax sorts itself out. Faulkner and James both reward this. So does Scibona: our reader's guide to The End walks through one of his long opening sentences clause by clause and suggests exactly this, finding the main verb and treating everything else as weather around it.

You do not need to read the whole book aloud. A paragraph at a time, when you notice your eyes moving without anything going in, is enough to reset your attention.

3. Keep a character list

This sounds like homework and it is the single best defense against confusion in a crowded novel. Use an index card as a bookmark. Each time a new person appears, write their name and three or four words: "Caddy, sister, loves Benjy." "Lily Briscoe, painter, guest." Many novels with large casts introduce people casually and come back to them a hundred pages later. The card saves you from flipping back.

Some editions of Proust and Tolstoy include their own lists of characters. Use them, but make your own anyway. Writing a name down is what fixes it in your head.

4. Give it fifty pages of confusion

This is the hardest rule and the most important. Almost every dense novel teaches you how to read it, but it does so slowly, and the lessons arrive in the first fifty pages or so. Before that point, confusion is normal and often deliberate.

Faulkner's Benjy section is the clearest case. On first reading, it is a fog of names and moments. Then the second section begins in a different voice, and things you half saw in the first section start to come into focus. Readers who quit at page thirty never get the payoff, because the payoff is built into the order.

So I make myself a promise: fifty pages without judgment. I do not ask whether I like the book until I have reached that point. If I am still lost at fifty, I check a short plot summary (spoiler-free if possible) to get my bearings and go on. That is not cheating. It is the same help a good friend would give.

I also read the last page first, more often than I admit. For books whose pleasure is in the texture and not the twist, it can help a lot with dense ones, because knowing roughly where you are heading frees you to pay attention to how you get there. Clementine Oduya's essay on reading the last page first makes the case better than I can.

5. Reread the first chapter when you finish

This is the habit that has given me the most pleasure. When you finish a dense novel, go back and reread the first chapter, or the first twenty pages. It takes an hour at most, and it is almost always a different book.

Openings of difficult novels are full of things you could not understand the first time: names you had not met yet, events you did not know were important, images that the ending turns into symbols. To the Lighthouse begins with a promise about a trip to the lighthouse, and the whole book is the long way round to keeping it. The End opens on the same carnival day it returns to at the close. Reading the opening again is the moment when the book finally makes sense as a whole, and it is often the moment you decide you loved it.

6. Quit honestly when you need to

Some books are not for you, or not for you yet. That is allowed. But I try to quit honestly, which means a few things.

• Quit after the fifty-page mark, not before, unless the book is doing something you find distasteful.
• Quit on purpose, not by drift. Put the book away with a note in it saying where you stopped and why.
• Distinguish "this is hard" from "this is not working." Hard is fine. Not working means you have tried the tools above and the book still gives you nothing back.
• Leave the door open. I gave up on The Golden Bowl in my twenties and finished it, with pleasure, in my forties. Some books need a reader who has lived a bit longer.

A worked example: a weekly plan for a 500-page novel

Here is the plan I use, adapted for a 500-page dense novel read over seven weeks, about five days of reading a week. It is gentler at the start and the end, because that is where most readers stumble.

A few notes on the plan. The low target in week one is deliberate: it gets you through the most confusing stretch without exhaustion. Week four is where I have abandoned more novels than anywhere else, which is why it gets no increase. And the last week is light on purpose, so you have room to finish slowly and go back to the beginning.

If you read in a book group, this plan maps neatly onto three meetings: one after week two, one after week four or five, one at the end. Our guide to book club questions for literary fiction has questions about structure and character that work well at each stage, and they help especially with novels that withhold things.

Good books to practice on

If you want to build up to the giants, start with dense novels that are short. To the Lighthouse is just over two hundred pages in most editions. Gilead is a little longer and gentler, demanding in its slowness but not in its sentences. Sebald's Austerlitz reads more easily than it looks once you accept its long paragraphs. Then try something bigger: a long Faulkner, a late James, or The End, whose crowded neighborhood rewards a character card more than almost any novel I know. The Ohio books in Ivo Marchbanks's guide to Rust Belt novels include several other demanding reads at manageable lengths.

The point of all this is not to turn reading into a regime. It is to get you to the part of a hard novel where it stops being hard and starts giving back. That point almost always comes. It just comes later than it does in easier books, and the readers who reach it are mostly the ones who planned for the wait.