The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal
Published 1948 · 56,925 words · about 4 hours at an average pace
How hard is The City and the Pillar to read?
The City and the Pillar scores 46 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: 52 out of 100
- Mid-century American vocabulary, plainly used.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Clear, well-made sentences.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Concrete, with an argument about ordinariness underneath.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Moderate period detail.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- A third person close to a man who does not understand himself.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The tennis court and the river carry the weight.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Steady distance between Jim's self-image and his conduct.
- Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
- The ending is abrupt and, in the revised version, deliberately unsettled.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Linear with a frame.
How The City and the Pillar is regarded
The City and the Pillar holds a literary regard score of 69 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.