Typo, I'm well aware that he talked a shitload of nonsense, much of it indefensible, and my best guess from the context of the rest of his writings is that he went off half-cocked in the essay West is responding to, working himself up into a lather over incomplete information that he didn't bother to investigate and that left him with a general impression that, rather than resolving the strike or directly helping the striking families, rich people were stepping in to forcibly separate children from unwilling families.

There's no excuse for the sloppiness, and no excuse for the anti-Semitism, but the impulse behind it is that he thought someone had judged struggling working-class families unfit to raise their own children, and that the best solution to class struggle was to remove the kids. Which, to be fair, a lot of high-minded people all over the world haven't for a second hesitated to do to working class, poor and indigenous families all over the Western world since time out of mind.

Deplorably sloppy, sexist, anti-Semitic, and the actual essay I'm sure is totally indefensible, but I've read probably 500-some-odd pages of his essays and I feel on pretty solid ground guessing that this particular one started with a half-read, half-understood story that punched his "Fuck you, you smug fucks, the people you're kicking ARE PEOPLE" triggers.

And, yep, Man Who Was Thursday. Emphatically not for everyone, possibly not even for many people at all (though Gaiman, PTerry and Mark Leyner love it so I'm at least not in bad company), but it pretty near saved my life many years ago when I was drowning in despair and immobility and poisonous brain chemicals. It was a gleeful, anarchic, joyous lifeline, and reading it over and over kept me tethered to a world outside my own head. As wretched as many of his beliefs are and as complicated and qualified and hedged in as my ability to recommend him is, I owe him one fuck of a debt for that one story.

Maybe I'll try it. But he triggers a lot for me. Because "We conservatives are really working class heroes fighting against condescending lefty elitists" is a pretty big meme among the worst of the right these days. Pings me as badly as his passionate anti-semitism does. And he was not causal about the anti-semitism. His work reads as someone who went out of his way to hate Jews. So if I try "Man who was Thursday" how much anti-semitism and how much condescending right wing garbage will I run into? If the answer is a lot, no point in my reading it - I won't be able to see the good stuff through a haze of rage. If "Thursday" is light on the anti-semitism and the union bashing, I might be able to give it a fair shake. I'm not asking for zero, just not much.

It is a parallel case for me to the reason many people legitimately can't enjoy Hemingway. Hemingway's misogynistic macho bullshit is too much and understandably they don't try to wade through it to see what Hemingway did well. But Hemingway told a good story, and he wrote male characters well, and his prose was, in its way, laconic poetry. And any one else who tried to the same thing mostly ended up just parodying Hemingway - which includes some of Hemingway's own later work. But when he was on his game, Hemingway was brilliant - if you can see past his attitude towards women, and I don't blame anyone who can't. (Actually I can think of one other person who could do this - Stephen Crane, who I strongly suspect Hemingway was influenced by.)

I don't think there's much of either in Thursday (and I'm pretty sure that if he saw how his working class hero stuff was being used by the current far right, he'd first throw up and then start punching heads).

My whole life, I only ever got one person to read it: a Jewish SF geek who called me the next morning to say, "God damn it, I stayed up all night reading it, and this is the novel I've been wanting to write my entire life." He tried to get his probably-identical twin brother to read it, and the brother got three pages in and shoved it back with a scornful remark about how it redefined twee.

JZ, it's one of my very favorite novels as well.

I read it, and it completely went over my head.

Did you read it on a Wednesday? It's a common mistake.

I think it's one of the all-time classic examples of "If you like this kind of thing, this is just the kind of thing you'll like."

But I tried! I remembered how much you loved it.

Raymond Chandler can be just as sexist as Hemingway...I'm not sure why I like him better...Maybe because Philip Marlowe doesn't take himself very seriously. Also, I never had to take a test on "The Long Goodbye" or "The Lady in The Lake"(Which is just as well...I read someplace that, Chandler, in alcohol's grip pretty much full-time by then, forgot to reveal who killed the Lady in the first place.)

I totally don't fault anyone for trying and not liking it. It's literary cilantro -- either you utterly groove on it, or it's soap, and there's not much in between.

And now I'm wondering what else is literary cilantro. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, probably. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, possibly. Some Virginia Woolf. All the stuff with an incredibly distinct flavor to it, that's going to be right from the first paragraph either entrancing or gag-worthy, and once that first reaction hits there isn't much that's going to make the reader change hir mind.