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attractive brevity, but there is an obvious disadvantage to her concision: her books tend to get buried under things. I can put my hands on Dennis Lehane’s historical novel The Given Day whenever I want, simply because it is seven hundred pages long. True, this hasn’t helped it to get itself read, but at least it’s visible. I didn’t lose The Girls of Slender Means , and it was as eccentric and funny and sad as the bunch of Spark novels I read last month.
    At the end of the last column, I vowed to have read Our Mutual Friend on an e-reader, and that didn’t happen either. This was partly because of the football, and partly because the experience of reading Dickens in this way was unsatisfactory. It wasn’t just that a Victorian novelist clearly doesn’t belong on a sleektwenty-first-century machine; I also took the cheapskate route and downloaded the novel from a website that allows you to download out-of-copyright novels for no charge. I helped myself to Babbitt and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the same time. The edition squirted down to me came without footnotes, however, and I rather like footnotes. More to the point, I need footnotes occasionally. (You may well work out for yourself eventually that the “dust” so vital to the plot is household rubbish, rather than fine grains of dirt, but it saves a lot of confusion and doubt to have this explained clearly and plainly right at the beginning of the novel.) The advantage handed the e-reading business by copyright laws hadn’t really occurred to me before I helped myself, but it spells trouble for publishers, of course; Penguin and Co. make a lot of money selling books by people who are long dead, and if we all take the free-downloading route, then there will be less money for the living writers. In a spirit of self-chastisement, I bought a copy of Our Mutual Friend immediately, even though I have one somewhere already. It won’t do any good, in the long run, because clearly books, publishers, readers, and writers are all doomed. But maybe we should all do what we can to stave off impending disaster just that little bit longer.
    I was attempting to read Our Mutual Friend for professional reasons: I’m supposed to be writing an introduction for a forthcoming edition. I read Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn for work, too: I was asked to consider taking on the job of adapting it for the cinema, and as about a million critics and several real people had told me how good it was, I took the offer seriously. It’s not the best circumstance in which to read a novel. Instead of admiring the writing, thinking about the characters, turning the page to discover what happens next, you’re thinking, Oh, I dunno, and, Yay, I could chop that, and, Miley Cyrus would be great for this, and, Do I really want to spend the next few years of my life wrecking this guy’s prose? It is a tribute to Tóibín’s novel—its quiet, careful prose, its almost agonizing empathy for itscharacters, its conviction in its own reality—that pretty soon I forgot why I was reading it, and just read it. And then, after I’d finished it, I decided that I wanted to adapt it—not just because I loved it, but because I could see it. Not the movie, necessarily, but the world of the novel: the third-class cabin in which his protagonist travels from Liverpool to New York in the early 1950s, the department store she works in, the dances she attends. They are portrayed with a director of photography’s relish for depth and light and detail.
    The laziest, most irritating book-club criticism of a novel is that the reader “just didn’t care” about the characters or their predicament, a complaint usually made in a tone suggesting that this banality is the product of deep and original thought. (It never seems to occur to these critics that the deficiency may well lie within themselves, rather than in the pages of