As I get older, read more, and spend a lot of time and energy reviewing what I have read, I am beginning to realize that I am not, despite aspirations, a particularly sophisticated reader. Beyond that, I have recently concluded that I tend not to trust my own reactions when it comes to reading and reviewing books that are deemed “literary” by other critics and/or readers. My priority in my reading life has always been to find and experience good story, but when I am confronted with something that doesn’t feel that way to me, rather than judge the book as being lacking, I judge myself as a reader. I think I am going to aim to change that in future.

I have experienced this twice in the past six months, and the way I came to realize it was to read others’ extremely perceptive (and much more objective) reviews on Goodreads. I just finished reading Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese, and at some point during its perusal I remarked that I found it nearly as hard going as Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. This observation should have revealed more to me than it did; but it took the remarks of “Ayaz,” on Goodreads, who gave the book a measly two stars (indicative of “it was okay”) to make my thoughts suddenly gel on the whole subject of literary fiction.

First, a description of the book: The protagonist, Marion, is a twin. He and his brother, Shiva, are the offspring of a brilliant but flawed British surgeon and his surgical assistant, a young and extremely devout Indian nun, whose pregnancy is only revealed to her colleagues (including the father) when she goes into labor. Their mother dies and, unable to cope with either the loss of Sister Mary Joseph Praise or the unexpected manifestation of offspring, their father abandons them; the twins are raised by a loving foster family made up of the remaining staff members (and their servants) of the mission hospital in Ethiopia in which they were born. Given the circumstances of their birth and that they are constantly exposed by their foster parents to both talk about and observation of medical procedures, it’s nearly inevitable that the two will grow up to become doctors, although the twins take entirely different paths towards this end. Personal conflicts and political events serve to separate the twins for an extended period, until tragedy reunites them.

I always have high hopes at the beginning of a book that has come recommended for its voice, its story, and/or the quality of its writing. Sometimes, as with Demon Copperhead, I recognize those merits for myself, while nonetheless being somewhat dragged down by both the intensity and longevity. But sometimes, as with Cutting for Stone, I struggle to recognize the merit as I grapple with the completion of the reading.

I’m not saying this is a bad book; although I breathed a small sigh of relief and reduced my rating from five stars to three after coming to certain realizations about my reaction to the book, I still found much to admire. But there were also unacknowledged problems with its narrative that I didn’t trust myself to articulate but that I could plainly see when someone else pointed them out for me.

One observation that resonated was a problem with a sustained development of the characters. When I reviewed Demon Copperhead, I noted that even though the book took me more than a month to read—having put it down for extended intervals to peruse more light-hearted works—I never lost sight of who the characters were, because their portrayal was so strong. With Verghese’s book I came to recognize that part of my frustration that caused me to drag out its completion was that there were certain key characters about whom I wanted to know more, but the author’s promising start in developing them was, over and over again, truncated or abandoned in favor of a sensationalistic denouement in the story as it transitioned from one stage to the next. His female characters are particularly clichéd, but even the men sometimes become indistinguishable one from another because of the similarity of their language, sentiments, and presentation. There were a couple of characters who stood out, but for the most part they were all subsumed by their careers.

Although Verghese is himself a medical doctor, I discovered that having that expertise and perspective were not enough for his descriptions to transport me into the lives of his characters. There were certain compelling moments in the throes of a complex operation that were exciting and involving, but the rest of it felt both clinical and too educational, for want of a better word, for a novel.

The purpose of this book was clearly to illustrate the depth and breadth of the idea of family amongst people who are unrelated but bonded, and although that was, to an extent, achieved, I grew first exasperated with and then bored by Marion’s viewpoint. And although this is ultimately a coming-of-age story like Demon Copperfield, I never perceived from Marion the same quality of voice that carried us from childhood to manhood. There was a certain sameness about the narration that caused it to be more tedious than it should have been.

The part I think I enjoyed most, and where I felt Verghese shone, was in the presentation of Ethiopia as a country and culture, caught up in the politics of change that were sweeping that nation in the upheaval of multiple revolutions. The world-building felt fresh and genuine.

Because of my realization about the sometimes excessive reverence I have for literary fiction, I will freely admit that I may have gone too far the other direction in judging this book. Certainly there are many readers out there who find its language, characters, and story completely compelling and who have freely awarded it top marks. If you still have a desire, after my comments, to read it for yourself, then by all means do so. We are all gripped differently by our reading, and you may agree with many that this is a masterpiece. But as for me, I’m going to try, in future, to tune in better to my innate sense of the quality of the story itself, which is my ultimate criteria, and let that lead me when evaluating any book, literary or otherwise.