The Married Man by Edmund White
Published 2011 · 90,475 words · about 6 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Married Man to read?
The Married Man scores 54 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 60 out of 100
- Rich, precise vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Long, elegant sentences.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Concrete illness and travel, reflectively handled.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- A third person close to a man avoiding what he knows.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The desert and the marriage carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Distance between Austin's evasions and the reader's view.
- Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
- The ending offers no consolation.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Linear.
How The Married Man is regarded
The Married Man holds a literary regard score of 49 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.