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The Big Book Project
The Big Book Project is a multi-venue reading experience for bibliophiles fascinated by long or dense works of fiction and interested in discussing them with others, one novel at a time.
The works selected will be capacious novels from the mid-nineteenth century through today that possess an abundant writing style or complexity in structure and themes.
The notion that reading need not be a solitary activity has special resonance with these novels given that there is much to discuss, elaborate upon and question in the authors’ expression of ideas. I like to think of these novels as abundant because I appreciate their richness and volume, characteristics bestow a sort of grace to luxuriate with the text.
The critic and scholar Alexander Nehamas writes that when a work of art beckons, it is because we do not fully understand it but feel the strong desire to do so. And it is this deliberative process, the journey, of trying to understand why a novel is extraordinary that I want to explore with fellow readers at The Big Book Project.
We discuss books like Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
The Big Book Project
Reading D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow with Mark Haber
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https://substack.com/@thebigbookproject
D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow rewards readers willing to move inward — into the psychological depths of a single family across three generations — rather than outward toward the conventional satisfactions of plot and incident. In this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers is joined by novelist Mark Haber for a rich, searching conversation about one of Lawrence’s most extraordinary and, as both agree, somewhat underappreciated works.
The Rainbow traces the Brangwen family through the pressures of nationality and gender, the primal forces of love and sexual desire, and the slow, irreversible transformation of a world that once measured time by the seasons. Lori and Mark explore how Lawrence sustains narrative intensity across three generations using a remarkably tight circle of characters — no strangers arrive to upend the story, no dramatic external events intrude — relying instead on what Mark notes as the novel’s defining quality: its passionate psychological interiority.
The conversation moves through the novel’s most compelling terrain: the question of whether The Rainbow is, as some critics have charged, misogynistic, or whether Ursula Brangwen — the novel’s fierce, searching third-generation protagonist — represents someone genuinely radical for her era; the treatment of sexuality as a primal, deeply psychological force rather than mere titillation; the immigrant narrative embedded in Lydia’s Polish origins and what it contributes to the novel’s portrait of cultural difference; the role of religion and nature as competing — or perhaps complementary — forms of the sacred; and the tender, unusually intimate portraits of father-daughter relationships that mark the book as distinctly working-class in its emotional priorities.
Mark Haber also discusses his forthcoming novel, Ada and shares his current reading, including a deep immersion in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.
Mark Haber is the author of three novels, most recently Lesser Ruins, and an editor at Coffee House Press. His fourth novel, Ada, is forthcoming in July.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction & Welcome
00:17 Why The Rainbow? Mark’s Curveball Pick
02:10 The Brangwen Family & Tight Circle of Characters
05:09 Three Generations in Under 500 Pages
08:44 Sexuality and the Psychological Interior
12:09 Is The Rainbow Misogynistic? Female Agency in Anna and Ursula
17:35 Flux and Consistency: Lawrence’s Narrative Rhythm
22:09 Is It a Dark Book? Tone, Mood, and Hope
24:33 Overwriting, Purple Prose, and Literary Genius
28:08 Religion, Faith, and Nature as the Sacred
33:43 Lydia’s Polish Origins and the Immigrant Narrative
38:06 Passion, Nature, and Human Longing
39:28 Father-Daughter Relationships Across Generations
47:16 Mark Haber’s Forthcoming Novel Ada
49:39 Current Reading and What’s Coming Next