Les Misérables

Les Misérables is one of the supreme achievements of nineteenth-century fiction: a vast, morally serious epic that braids the fates of an ex-convict striving for redemption, the policeman who hunts him across decades, a mother destroyed by poverty, the daughter she loses, and a band of student revolutionaries in 1832 Paris. Hugo's gifts are scaled to match his ambition — the celebrated set-piece chapters are routinely singled out as among the most thrilling and emotionally overwhelming scenes in all of literature, and the inner life of his central character gives the century one of its great portraits of conscience. Modern critics treat the book's standing as settled, invoking landmark language: one of the greatest novels ever written, a keystone of nineteenth-century literature.

The book's most famous flaw is inseparable from its greatness. Hugo stops his story cold for dozens of pages at a stretch to discourse on the Battle of Waterloo, the construction of the Paris sewers, street slang, and the rules of cloistered convents; by one estimate more than a quarter of the text advances neither plot nor subplot. This is the complaint that has recurred from the very first reviewers to modern readers, and it is the question on which opinion genuinely splits — some find these passages the novel's true intellectual center, a running essay on history and justice, while others treat them as hurdles to be skipped on the way to the story.

On the story itself, agreement is close to unanimous. The novel's great themes — the difference between law and justice, grace and hard-won redemption, poverty and revolution — are pursued with a passion and a structural daring that critics agree was unmatched in its day. It is worth noting that at publication the public embraced the book immediately while some of France's most prominent literary figures attacked it as vulgar and immoral; posterity has sided decisively with the readers. Anyone who has met this story through its adaptations will find the novel deeper, stranger, and far more capacious than any of them.