Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel

Death and Mr. Pickwick is a lavishly detailed, fictionalized account of how The Pickwick Papers came to be. But it’s also a novel about influences and associations, about the many characters, large and small, major and inconsequential, who contribute to a life, a project, or a legacy. This is an epic work about an epic work, one that deftly blurs the line between reporting and storytelling.

Much like any Dickens work, this novel is indulgent in the extreme. Every player, no matter how minor, gets their due, and as a reading experience, at times, it’s exhausting. But it is an impressive, ambitious work that inspires such exhaustion, a novel that aspires to the lofty echelon of “literature,” and very much deserves it.