The first time I read “Atonement,” I loathed it.
I’ve always been a quick reader, able to blaze through novels in a day, and I expected Ian McEwan’s book — which had been on my list for years — to be yet another seductively lovely, morally complex addition to my 2024 reading challenge. But, 10 pages in, I felt all my excitement grind to a halt. The imagery struck me as indulgent, the characterization weak: a frustrating muddle I wasn’t excited to complete.
Three months later, reading the last page, I, who am never brought to tears by what I read, was sobbing. The story that I’d felt so detached from had snuck up on me, and the result was emotionally devastating. No book has taken me longer to read than “Atonement,” and I’ve never disliked reading a novel more. Yet sticking it out was significantly more rewarding than I expected. The ending was provocative and powerful, and the novel presented insights on grief, memory, guilt, and misgivings. Not quite enough to compensate for McEwan’s adjective choices, yet impactful all the same.
Feeling confused or stuck while reading is frustrating, and our instinctive reaction to a text can quickly become a judgment of its worth. “The reader, to protect his or her feelings, blames the book, and becomes entrenched and rigid in their prejudice,” says Dr. Maude Hines, a professor of English and Chair of Black Studies at Portland State University. Discomfort can harden into a concrete verdict: this is bad, overwritten, trite, elitist — pick a negative adjective and slap it on. But frustration is not necessarily indicative of failure from the reader or the writer.
Distinguishing between productive difficulty and genuine inaccessibility requires nuance. Hines believes that for individual readers, the line is “To be challenged and to be made to think and to figure things out, whether it’s through sounding out dialect or Old English, or seeing through the eyes of an unfamiliar perspective, without getting pushed so far that you protect yourself by rebelling.” Difficulty becomes productive when it stretches the reader without shutting them down.
Alexandra Jacobs, a literary critic at The New York Times, emphasizes how personal this metric is. “Something that would be incomprehensible to me might be catnip to a colleague,” she explains. Complexity is not an intrinsic quality that clings permanently to a text. Instead, it emerges from the interaction between text and reader.
A novel that debates theological intricacies might enthrall a religious scholar, but alienate someone encountering those themes for the first time. A story told in fragments might feel intuitive to a reader accustomed to nonlinear storytelling, but disorienting to someone who prefers chronology. Our reactions are shaped by prior knowledge, cultural context, and lived experience. What we label as “great writing” can align suspiciously well with what is familiar to us. “It’s important to not feel like it’s a failure if you don’t understand everything,” says Hines.
Of course, not all texts are equally challenging, and not all challenges are equally rewarding. Some writing is needlessly dense and some storytelling is elliptical because it is underdeveloped — to pretend otherwise would be naive. However, encountering difficulty does not reflect an inherent failure of any party. “There should be no verdict on the character of either the reader or writer,” says Jacobs.
In fact, moral ambiguity and elliptical storytelling may strengthen our ability to sit with uncertainty. In a technologically advancing world that increasingly rewards ease and convenience, lingering with a question, without forcing a singular conclusion, is a crucial skill. Through constant immersion in algorithmic feeds, we are increasingly wired to seek accessible content that resonates with our worldview. “The urge to not be challenged by literature is similar to the urge to want to be around sycophants,” observes Hines.
Sitting with difficult literature stretches our capacity to hold contrasting interpretations, and in doing so teaches us that clarity may be partial, gradual, or absent entirely. It teaches us to reckon with ambiguity, and to interrogate our convictions. Additionally, with technology comes increasingly easy opportunities for understanding. Obscure references, mentions of historical events, or cultural context that once required encyclopedic knowledge or a long afternoon at the library are now searchable in seconds.
It’s important to recognize that celebration of difficulty can slide into elitism. “I don’t think obscurity for its own sake is valuable at all,” states Jacobs. Not every reader has the same access to time, background knowledge, or educational support. We all differ in attention spans and interests. With the sheer volume of books in the world, there’s no need to labor over every piece of difficult literature. Reading is deeply beneficial, whether it’s a graphic novel, audiobook, random Kindle find, picture book, bestseller, dishwasher manual, or literary classic.
Yet judgments about the difficulty of a text are rarely neutral. They are shaped by cultural assumptions about who is permitted to be complex. “A white male author is a genius because of his complexity, and a Black female author is supposed to be accessible,” states Hines. This double standard allows certain authors to be lauded for labyrinth prose, while others have their work deemed unreadable for experimenting with form. The Western canon is filled with writers — many of them white men — whose opacity is seen as evidence of depth.
Consider James Joyce, who was renowned for densely layered prose. Much of the humor, brilliance, and wordplay of his writing is evident only with multi-lingual proficiency and historical context. As readers, we’re often primed to assume that laboring through texts like his will be worthwhile. Yet when writers outside of the traditional canon experiment with form, narrative, or meaning, they are often asked to justify that complexity. Accessibility is a worthy goal, but is often applied unevenly.
This inconsistency reveals that responses to difficulty within a text are not purely aesthetic, but are often social and political. “All of us have to be able to read as a white male, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied hero, whether human or not,” says Hines. “Often work that is from the perspective of identities that are not so hemogenic — like a novel about a Chicana lesbian, for example — will get labeled as inaccessible or niche, because we haven’t all been trained to contort ourselves to fit into that perspective.”
None of this is to say that every reader must finish every difficult book. Personal preferences vary, and time is scarce. But there’s a key difference between choosing not to continue with a book, and deeming it objectively flawed. The former is honest, the latter often defensive.
While I still bristle at many of Ian McEwan’s linguistic decisions — I remain convinced that the phrase “sweetly diminished toes” is a worthless addition to any narrative — wading through all 351 pages of “Atonement” allowed me to experience a beautifully constructed meditation on memory and guilt. Hines urges readers to think about a text after they read it, reflecting, “Did this bring you joy? Did this make you think about something you said four years ago in a different context? That’s a gift.” Tension and irritation can be exactly what makes a text transformative.
Reframing complexity as a playground rather than a trap changes the experience. Approaching difficult writing with curiosity instead of defensiveness, we allow it to stretch us. There’s no requirement to love every second, or agree with every choice, or stop writing petty reviews online. Yet the fear of frustration or complexity shouldn’t deter anyone from approaching a longer text, trying out a new genre, or taking a difficult English course. In choosing, again and again, to engage rather than retreat, we cultivate a deeper capacity for nuance, on the page and beyond.
