Why Is Dostoevsky So Complicated? - Americans Want 'Fun With Dick And Jane', The Best Book On The Shelf

Indianola, Mississippi is a small town on the bayou with nothing much to recommend it except home cooking, a repository of antebellum archives collected from two of the most important plantations of the South, and Archer D. Moran, the most outrageously outspoken Mayor the town had ever had.  

He was the spitting image of Donald Trump, said the Indianola Clarion, expressing their hope that Moran had higher ambitions, national ambitious; for the Mayor was solidly conservative, as patriotic as any proud veteran ever was, and a believer in the restoration of traditional, originalist American values. 

'Why, my life is right here in Indianola', the Mayor said to a group of supporters at Thursday's weekly meeting of the Kiwanis Club, 'and I ain't got no hankerin' to change it.  The Mississippi Delta suits me just fine', but in his demurral, the men around the table knew he was just being modest.  The man clearly had higher ambitions than just cotton fields, catfish, and the bayou. 

Now it just so happened that Archer D. Moran was not just a good ol' boy, bass boat fisherman, hunter, and Republican, he was the town's intellectual, a man whose bookshelves were filled with the world's greatest literature. 

'I aim to improve myself', he said when a visitor remarked on his library, 'and I intend to read every single one of these volumes you see there'. Volumes he had bought in bulk, The Great Books of the World, The World's Most Famous Authors, and A Compendium of World Literature. 

He had already had a go at the collection, beginning with Mark Twain, a Yankee who wrote knowingly about life on the Mississippi.  Moran felt he knew Huck Finn, felt he had some of the boy's gumption and sassiness, and read the chapters of Huck and Jim on the raft with the Duke and the Dauphin many times.  Twain had captured the feel of the river and the borderline between Free and Slave States.  Twain's vernacular was familiar and so were the towns up and down the river. 

When it came to anything a big farther afield, Moran had trouble.  He got tangled in the thicket of Dickensian characters and gave up on A Tale of Two Cities, perplexed at who got locked up in the tower and why, and what was he doing cobbling shoes?

For months after the last collection came from the publisher, Moran looked at the great bulge on the top shelf, fat tomes of War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov, books he had been told must be read to complete anyone's literary education; but like most readers, he was totally lost.  Unfortunately he began with Dostoevsky, one of the most impenetrable of the Russian writers, an author obsessed with Christ, his duplicity, the absolute necessity of religion and its accountability, and the role of the Orthodox Church in Russian life.  Karamazov is not an easy read by any means, but the accomplished reader will soon be immersed in the psycho-social, deeply philosophical world of the author. 

Moran, for all his good intentions, was surprised at his inability to make heads or tails of the story - if that's what you could call these treatises on divinity, redemption, the nature of humanity, and the eternal schisms of religion.  There was no story there at all, just a series of indecipherable disquisitions.  How on earth did Dostoevsky ever get such an enviable reputation?  What was the point of writing such dense, turgid, overthought books?

That, he mused, was part of America's problem today - overthinking, overintellectualizing, making simple affairs as complicated as a cypress swamp, lose your bearings for an instant, and you are lost among the alligators and water moccasins.  When Donald Trump said he wanted to drain the swamp of Washington, Mayor Moran knew exactly what he meant. 

At the same time the Mayor, not a stupid man by any means, began to wonder about his intellectual depth.  How was it that a man who had made it through two years of college, complemented shop with literature, and had an open mind to everything international was so befuddled by books that had been read, understood, and referenced by millions since their publication?  Was he less intellectually able than he thought?

He dismissed that errant thought out of hand, and simply concluded that like baseball you had to work your way up - tee ball, coach pitch, kid pitch, Little League, etc. No one went from kindergarten to a 100 mph fastball with no stops along the way; and so it was that he gave Dostoevsky another try, banging away at the first chapter bound and determined to make sense of it and make some headway before the week was up. 

As a side note, he was asked by his wife to stop by the library and pick up some romantic novels. When he asked which ones, his wife replied, 'Oh, any ones.  Just get five or ten from the rack', and there they were by the hundreds under Romantic Fiction.  The covers all showed beautiful women in tearful poses with a man's silhouette in the background.  'A Night to Remember', 'The Last Belle of the Ball', 'Midnight's Tears' and many more. 

 

He flipped through one or two, found them easy to read, engaging (what would become of Felicity?) and similar.  One could read one in a few hours time. 

Moran had always been somewhat dismissive about his wife's literary choices, but now that he had taken the time to actually read some of the library offerings, he began to understand.  There was no difference between 'Two Women, Two Loves' and Tennessee Williams.  They both wrote of loves lost and found, romance, frailty, and courage, so why put them in different categories?  It was like the soap operas his wife watched, melodramatic, tearful affairs about infidelity, deceit, and unhappiness.  

What was the difference between them and Absalom, Absalom, a book by another Mississippian, William Faulkner, on his shelf for years.  Why would any author deliberately choose to discombobulate time, perception, events, and emotions and reassemble them in a devilishly incomprehensible order?  

Moran thought of Fun with Dick and Jane, his first grade reader. 'See Spot run', he remembered.  The little cocker spaniel running with cute Jane who looked very much like Nancy Blythe who sat next to him.  Now that was writing, he thought - not in its basic simplicity but the whole idea of art.  Make it simple so people can understand it. If the same themes are broached in Faulkner and As the World Turns, then why not sit back and enjoy the show?

 

The same was true of numbers.  Why grapple with algebraic equations when the most challenging mathematical calculation you ever needed was totting up a grocery bill or at worst, calculating a 20 percent tip on a restaurant check.  He was not for dumbing things down exactly, just for getting more practical and sensible; which is why he had to shake his head at the cockamamie nonsense claimed as absolute truth by politicians.  Ninety-two genders on a fluid gender spectrum? Transgender reassignment surgery? The black man on the pinnacle of human society?

This is where reading Dostoevsky and Faulkner gets you - into the weeds where you just trudge and fumble and pull up whatever soggy clump you find. 

'Very impressive', said Bartleby Jones, owner of the local feed store in Indianola, when he saw Mayor Moran's library.  'Have you read them all??, to which question he demurred and swept his hand over and above the bookcase to the bronze Remington copy of a lassoing rider on horseback.  'Now, that's something he said', and he meant it - simplicity and frankness in one six-inch piece of metal.