Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young
Published 1965 · 329,450 words · about 45 hours at an average pace
How hard is Miss MacIntosh, My Darling to read?
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling scores 79 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very 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: 75 out of 100
- An enormous, incantatory vocabulary sustained over 1,200 pages.
- Sentence structure: 88 out of 100
- Sentences that run for a page and repeat with variation — among the most demanding prose in American fiction.
- Abstraction: 88 out of 100
- Reality and illusion treated as the sole subject; there is almost no plot to hold onto.
- Information density: 82 out of 100
- Relentless; the repetition itself is the density.
- Narrative indirection: 78 out of 100
- A narrator whose account dissolves into other people's dreams.
- Symbolic density: 88 out of 100
- Almost nothing is literal.
- Ironic distance: 45 out of 100
- Little irony; the mode is incantation.
- Resolution withholding: 88 out of 100
- Nothing resolves, at extraordinary length.
- Structural complexity: 85 out of 100
- A bus journey that becomes an endless nested reverie.
How Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is regarded
Miss MacIntosh, My Darling holds a literary regard score of 41 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.