People can recognize the good stuff if they are exposed to it.
Joanna
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Right on. Exactly. War and Peace and Sentimental Education are simple, clear, ease reads that are completely accessible. There are no stylistic barriers, the themes are not hidden or obscure and the vast majority of grown-ups will understand exactly what is going and why the characters act the way they do. Hopefully they will completely enjoy both novels, although in different ways.
Sentimental Education is the story of two young students nineteen or so who go the big city to go to school, get laid, have adventures, make their fortune, and find themselves. They do all that in the mist of turbulent political times and ultimately fail in their greatest dreams as the vast majority of young people do. They end as somewhat cynical grown ups not much wiser than they were as kids. They laugh at their dreams and decide in the end the best time they ever had was their fourteen year old adventure of going to small town prostitute to discover love. Pretty damned classic story, redone thousands of times in other novels, plays, and films.
Henry James reviewed the novel and hated it---mainly because Frederick was no hero, there was no moral center, it didn't seem to capture the drama of events, and was filled with second rate characters. But the problem was that James didn't understand the novel, didn't understand that the frail sensibility of romanticism which promised heros and which was also framed as the sensibility of the very young and naive could not survive the assaults of modernity, big cities, and the disastrous reversals of history. In other words, life was not that simple or heroic. I didn't understand it the first time I read it either, except to think it was a fabulous painting more or less wasted on two ordinary guys.
War and Peace is just as accessible, just as plain spoken, and enjoyable. You meet so many characters that you have to make a list to keep track of them all. You are totally emersed in another world of truly vast proportion. A whole generation from near the top to near the bottom, from twenty-five (youth) to forty (middle age) are transformed by the events of war and peace that move them, their country, and history from one age into another.
I had no idea these were masterpieces until I tried reading other novels, many of which seemed thin and pale by comparison. That is how I understood that they had changed my sensibility and demands on art. But those experiences didn't stop me from humming to Ray Charles, on the radio driving in LA traffic.
Everybody lives in multiple worlds all the time...
CG