Tom Jones

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (fiction, 886 pages)

I’ve been meaning to read Tom Jones for years. In theory, it hits right in my sweet spot. Classic novel? Check. Big, fat novel? Check. Witty? Check. When it ended up on the list of books my book group planned to read, I was almost disappointed. I wanted to read it right then. But I held off, until finally, it came up as our March read.

You know the punchline, of course. I hated it.

I grant that it is a great book. As one of the first novels, it holds an undeniable place in literary history. I appreciated the structure, and I marveled at the feat of its construction. But I didn’t like the story or the characters, and therefore I couldn’t bring myself to like the book.

**Caution: What follows necessarily contains SPOILERS. I think that’s probably fair enough in a review of a book written almost 260 years ago, but if you haven’t read it yet, and plan to, please stop reading now.** 

Primarily, I didn’t like Tom Jones, and, while I didn’t much like Sophia either, she was a good, sweet, honest girl who didn’t deserve to end up with a pathological womanizer who was clearly going to start cheating on her during the honeymoon. I did not want Tom Jones to end up winning the girl. When you’re rooting for the hero to fail, you know you’re reading the wrong book.

Women came off particularly badly in this book. Almost all of them were portrayed as bad people. Sophia, who was almost the only exception to this, showed her only backbone in going against her father and not marrying the man he chose for her. Tom Jones’s guardian, Allworthy, in describing why he likes Sophia so much, explains that it’s because she would never think of expressing her opinion to a man or thinking herself anywhere near his equal.

I know that I am coming at this from a 21st-century perspective, and that I am inserting too much of the reader into the book. But I can’t help it. I can recognize that it’s a great book, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.