Books Read: Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young.

If I was smart, this would be my shortest review. No more than a sentence. Something like: It’s not bad. Or: It’s got moments. Or: Overhyped, but fine. Or: What’s with the bus driver?!

Don’t you hate those reviews of really long books where the writer spends most of the time crapping on about the length? It’s like they want a prize—or at least a participation ribbon—for slogging through all those words.

This is the Substack Note I wrote when I finished Miss Macintosh, My Darling:

“Is there a club I can join? I feel there should be a club. Or a gold star. Or an honours board. Or some sort of recognition.”

Yes. I’m a hypocrite.

But I want to be clear: Miss MacIntosh, My Darling—or as I refer to it, Miss Macca—is a very, very, very long book. It clocks in at 671,000 words and just over 1,300 pages. Holding this novel in your hands, your wrist screeches in pain. When you see the size of the type, your eyes quiver in fear. It took me six months to read Miss Macca—the longest I’ve ever spent reading a novel, including Ulysses by Joyce (which, in comparison, is a breeze).

But I did read it. Like a marathon runner, I flagged multiple times but kept finding second, third and fourth winds. There were times when I hated every single motherfucking page and other times when I let myself drown in all that beautiful imagery.

It’s not so much that Miss Macca is a challenging read, or even that it’s not a book for everyone,¹ it’s that anyone who tells you this novel is a joy to read from first to last page is either lying to you or themselves. Miss Macca isn’t meant to be loved. It’s meant to be endured. It’s a novel that goes out of its way to test your stamina, to infuriate and befuddle and delight (yes, there are moments of sheer, glorious beauty). Do I know that this was Young’s intention? No. Of course not. But whatever Young’s actual plans—noting it took her eighteen years to write the novel—the final product is a book that has no interest kowtowing to the reader. It gives no fucks. This isn’t a bad thing. Not every work of fiction needs to be accessible. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I pretended that Miss Macca totally enraptured me.

And here’s the thing (and yes, I realise I haven’t told you what Miss Macca is about; I’m getting there). As a modernist novel (assuming that’s actually what Miss Macca is, I’ll defer to the experts on that), the prose isn’t tricky to parse. Each sentence and paragraph makes perfect sense. What makes the novel so challenging is the repetition, the distinct lack of momentum, and the relentless, obsessive desire to beat a single idea, concept, or theme into total submission.

Nothing speaks more to the static nature of Miss Macca than the fact that most of the novel is set on a bloody bus—a bus that never seems to reach its destination. On board is a ranting bus driver, a married couple, the wife pregnant, and Vera Cartwheel. She’s, ostensibly, our point of view character, though you’ll sometimes forget she exists. Vera is searching for her old nursemaid, the titular Miss Macintosh, who abruptly vanished one day when Vera was a child.

Vera reflects on her mother, bedridden and lost in opium-induced haze, dreaming all sorts of imaginary, absurd, bizarre things. She reflects on the stoic rigidity of Miss Macintosh, who she discovers is completely bald (and also flat-chested, not so much a discovery but something that gets mentioned quite a lot). She reflects on the family lawyer, Mr Spitzer, who isn’t sure if he’s himself or his dead twin brother Peron (a noted larrikin and gambler). She also reflects on Cousin Hannah, a legendary adventurer, mountain climber, and feminist. They are such an eccentric bunch of characters, and in a shorter novel, I might have loved them, but in a book, this reflexive, where every doubt and anxiety is chewed over until it becomes meaningless, they stop being people and become just names on a page.

And yet, as cyclical and monotonous as this novel is, as frustrating as it can be to read page after page after page of Mr Spitzer doubting his identity, believing he might actually be dead, when the book is read in small chunks, the endless rehashing doesn’t matter as much. Instead, you focus on the language, how hypnotic it is, how the repetition is strangely relaxing, and how some of the best dreams you’ve ever had result from reading Miss Macca. It doesn’t make the listing and relisting and re-relisting of Cousin Hannah’s achievements any less dull (yes, we get the point, Marguerite, she’s a lonely, underappreciated feminist!), but it does make it… bearable.

There are moments of wonder. Not just Vera’s mother’s opium-induced dreams (which are delightfully bonkers) but also some of the strange people Mr Spitzer… or was it his brother?… encounters. Then there’s the stupendous climax that lasts 200 pages (or around 100,000 words). Vera is off the bus,² sitting in a cafe, speaking to the waitress. It’s late at night or early in the morning or a timeless present in between, and the waitress, Esther Longtree, eternally pregnant, outlines to Vera all the stillborn children she’s had with multiple men. It’s horrifying and sentimental and brutal and tragic, and… while I’m not saying it makes up for that middle section where Mr Spitzer goes on and on and on about butterflies… it also sort of does.

Do I recommend Miss MacIntosh, My Darling? Yes. I do. Because there’s no experience quite like reading this novel.³ But if you do read Miss Macca, follow these rules:

1. Read no more than 10 pages per day. Even if you’re on a roll—stop at 10 pages.

2. Take week-long breaks (every 150 pages or so). You might not pick up Miss Macca again; you might let it fester on your shelf partly read, but those breaks allowed me to reset, to pay closer attention to the words when I was lured back to the novel.

3. Read it at night. Before bed. As close to sleep time as possible. Your dreams will thank you.

4. If you follow point three and you’re flagging after three or four pages, then stop. Let the novel take you to sleepy land.

5. Finally, be prepared to have this novel on your bedside table for six to twelve months. Yes, there will be times when the bookmark looks like it’s not moving, that holding the novel is painful because it’s weighted so much to one side, that you’re not sure the spine will survive (it will.⁴) But like everything about Miss Macca, it’s all an illusion, and once you understand that, time, space and the very structure of reality won’t matter anymore.

I was going to end this review with the final sentence from the novel. But, fuck it. Discover it for yourself!

1. I mean, it isn’t, but that should be obvious given how long it is for starters.

2. This isn’t a spoiler. You cannot spoil this novel.

3. House of Leaves, Ulysses, and Riddley Walker are unique reading experiences, but they are nothing like this book.

4. I haven’t said anything about the magnificent Dalkey Archive and the Dalkey Essentials, but they’ve done their utmost to keep Miss Macca to one volume. The spine will crack. There is no avoiding that. But it will hold if you’re not foolish.