Books like The Enormous Room

Authors who only wrote one single novel are a curious lot. Some came up with a masterpiece and then died (Emily Bronte, Sylvia Plath). So that's a pretty good excuse. ( Ill-informed interviewer to Emily Bronte : "Why didn't you write a follow up to your fabulous novel Wuthering Heights? " I died." "Oh, okay. I did not know that.") Some were so stunned by their one novel’s success they were struck dumb (Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell). Some were playwrights who must have thought heck, this novel business can’t be that hard, I can do that, and found they actually couldn’t very well (Oscar Wilde, Berthold Brecht). One took about 25 years to come up with a novel which is The Worst Book In the World – yes, Marguerite Young! - it’s really an achievement, you try and write the Worst Book in the World, it sounds easy but it ain’t). E E Cummings turned out to be a very interesting but often irritating poet but aged 23 he over-wrote this 200 page memoir about being wrongly imprisoned as a spy in World War 1 France and it was published as a novel.Ugh, it isn’t good. I thought it would be quirky, like his poetry, but it’s hoity-toity and leadenfooted, like a vicar made to dance a tango at gunpoint. I was struggling to get to page 40 so I found an audiobook version on Youtube and tried that but that was even worse, like a vicar trying to balance a wedding cake on his head whilst dancing the tango at gunpoint. The shrinking light which my guide held had become suddenly minute; it was beating, senseless and futile, with shrill fists upon a thick enormous moisture of gloom. To the left and right through lean oblongs of stained glass burst dirty burglars of moonlight.Abandoned with relief.