There’s Vera’s mother, a bedridden opium addict-“the horizontal person”-whose labyrinthine, hallucinatory monologues are among the book’s many delights: she imagines she’s conversing with dead queens and kings, golden harps, chandeliers, Milton, Shelley, subway musicians, and “two sister ravens who had created the universe.”Īround page two hundred, the warnings about the book begin to seem less hysterical. There is Vera’s aunt Hannah, an unmarried suffragette who owns fifty wedding dresses, and Esther Longtree, an eternally pregnant woman. It’s at this point that the novel-which begins as a quest-folds in on itself, tunneling into reveries and flashbacks, drifting into the consciousness of other characters, most of them women. Early on, Vera notices that the bus is not driving a straight line but circling the same route. “She was neither a high brow nor a low brow but just, as she was pleased to admit, a plain middle brow, a Middle Westerner, trying to steer her middle course.” But little in the book is what it seems-especially that which appears ordinary. What makes Miss MacIntosh so remarkable is that she is, unlike most of the people in Vera’s life, ordinary. But here’s an attempt: Vera has come to the Midwest from Boston in search of Miss MacIntosh, her childhood nursemaid, a spinster from What Cheer, Iowa, who mysteriously disappeared after Vera’s fourteenth birthday. Even the basic operations of character and perspective aren’t straightforward. It seems impossible to describe the book in terms of plot or structure. Upon Young’s death in 1995, thirty years after the novel was published, the New York Times proclaims it “one of the most widely unread books ever acclaimed.” “I’ve paid for no one’s education!” he writes. One Amazon reviewer claims he gave a copy of the twelve-hundred-page novel to each of his friends and promised that if they finished, he would pay for their children’s college education. The online reader reviews I found vary between naked revulsion and sheepish endorsement. When it was published in 1965, the critic Peter Prescott gave up after two days, even though his editor offered him four times the normal rate (everyone else had refused). They feel less like user warnings or cautionary tales than being forced to gaze upon the skeletons of those who had previously made the attempt. But in the history of my reading life, I’ve encountered nothing like the caveat lectors surrounding Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Critics complain that they’re exasperating or impossible or not worth the time. Like the holy books, long novels are more often maligned than read. I have occasionally come across mentions of Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling as a notoriously long and unreadable novel this charming essay by Meghan O’Gieblyn makes about as good a case for the defense as is likely to be mounted (first acknowledging the problems the reader faces):
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