Whites by Norman Rush
Published 1986 · 161 pages · 40,250 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Short Fiction
How hard is Whites to read?
Whites scores 48 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: 42 out of 100
- Contemporary diverse vocabularies.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Clear, varied sentences.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Race, class, and American life.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Each story richly observed.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Stories reveal through implication.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Whiteness itself examined.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Rush maintains knowing distance.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Stories end ambiguously.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- Story collection.
How Whites is regarded
Whites holds a literary regard score of 52 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.