The Wild Iris by Louise Glück
Published 1992 · 3,500 words · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Wild Iris to read?
The Wild Iris scores 66 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: 62 out of 100
- Botanical, theological.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- Gluck spare lines.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- God, death, garden.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Garden, seasons.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- Multiple voices.
- Symbolic density: 82 out of 100
- Flowers, God, soul.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Devotional intensity.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- Seasonal cycle.
- Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
- Three voices.
How The Wild Iris is regarded
The Wild Iris holds a literary regard score of 63 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.