Broken People by Sam Lansky
Published 2020 · 69,850 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Autofiction, LGBTQ Fiction
How hard is Broken People to read?
Broken People scores 44 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Lansky writes in clean, contemporary magazine prose -- precise but never showing off, closer to Beach Read's plainspoken register than to any specialized vocabulary. Occasional wellness-culture terms (plant medicine, energy work) get explained in context rather than left opaque.
- Sentence structure: 40 out of 100
- Sentences run short to medium and are built for momentum rather than subordination -- a journalist's economy rather than Jamesian nesting. Long paragraphs of introspection appear during the retreat scenes, but they accumulate through repetition, not embedded clauses.
- Abstraction: 46 out of 100
- The retreat forces the narrator into constant self-diagnosis -- trauma, shame, addiction -- but every abstraction stays tethered to a specific memory or scene, closer to The Great Gatsby's social observation than to Godot's pure abstraction.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- The novel alternates a tightly scoped three-day retreat with flashback chapters, keeping what readers must track per page manageable -- denser than genre fiction but well short of a book layering multiple timeframes and historical registers.
- Narrative indirection: 44 out of 100
- Sam narrates his own contradictions in the moment -- catching himself lying about the shaman, about his family -- which asks more of the reader than a flatly earnest confession would, though nothing like Gatsby's fully mediated narrator.
- Symbolic density: 36 out of 100
- The retreat's rituals carry some symbolic weight -- the shaman's "open-soul surgery," encounters staged to signify transformation -- but the novel keeps returning to literal, remembered scenes rather than building a sustained symbolic system.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Lansky lets Sam mock the retreat's New Age trappings even while desperately wanting them to work, a doubled perspective closer to Brothers Karamazov's sincere-but-ironic frame than to outright satire.
- Resolution withholding: 46 out of 100
- The weekend ends, but Sam's actual recovery doesn't -- the novel refuses the tidy after of a redemption memoir, landing closer to Beloved's lingering unresolve than to a genre novel's clean ending.
- Structural complexity: 52 out of 100
- Chapters cut between the three-day retreat and a scrambled chronology of Sam's life before it, real chronological churn for a debut novel, though nowhere near Midnight's Children's multi-generational scope.
How Broken People is regarded
Broken People holds a literary regard score of 27 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.