Last month I had the pleasure of reading AS Byatt’s Possession: A Romance. It was an excellent novel, and one of these days I’ll get around to awarding it an official five-star rating here at Pizappa.

Now, when I really enjoy a novel, I usually proceed to frantically read everything else its author has ever written. So I had hardly set down Possession before I was at the used bookstore (in Lincoln, Nebraksa) purchasing a copy of The Virgin in the Garden, one of Byatt’s earlier works, and one that, the back cover blurb assured me, shared all of the qualities that made Possession so excellent. (Note to self: when all of a book’s glowing back-cover review quotes are actually talking about a different novel by the same author, beware!)

At any rate, I’m about 200 pages in, and I’m close to stalling out. With Possession, I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough; I burned through its 500ish pages in less than a week. But Virgin is killing me. Nothing noteworthy is happening at all, and Byatt is devoting truly vast amounts of verbiage to describe completely insignificant details. Take this passage:

In front of the hearth Simmonds had a Swedish woven rag rug in jolly primary colours, scarlet, lemon, Cambridge blue. In his chairs he had rather small hard square cushions in the same colours, but different cloths. They were clearly chosen to match the rug, or vice versa, and the match was unsuccessful enough to trigger off a perceptual disturbance in Marcus, who kept glancing from one to the other in an attempt to find some relationship of balance or tone between them, though they were too similar for any discordia concors, if not similar enough to be easy on the eye. This problem was temporarily eliminated when Simmonds, in order to create a homely or intimate atmosphere, switched off all the lights but one, a large table-lamp made from a carboy with a dark honey-coloured shade embellished with swarms of little commas, or organisms, or curved pins, in black, which swirled in aspiring tear-shaped clouds towards the upper rim which they never touched. This lamp made a pool of dark yellow light on the hearth and reduced the cushions to shadows of colour.

Allow me to brandish my editor’s scalpel and pare that down a bit:

The rug in Simmond’s house clashed with the chair cushions. This bothered Marcus. Then Simmonds turned off most of the lights, which helped.

This is even assuming that the color of Simmonds’ home furnishings is important to the plot, which as of page 200 is not the case. I’m not usually one to complain about verbosity in literature, but I just can’t take much more of this. For somebody with such a strong opinion about popular fiction, Byatt isn’t doing a whole lot to sway me over to her enlightened side of the literary aisle.