We Have A Winner

Welcome back to The Span, the longest-running culture newsletter Defector has ever produced. This week, we’ve got Kelsey McKinney writing about the latest dispatch from a woman who fell through time, a look at how Bridgerton’s fantasies rely on dead dads, a conversation with Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon, plus a review of The Drama.

Finally, we’ve crowned the inaugural winner of Middlemarch Madness! Although not all of us here agree with the voters.

Here are some cool blogs from Defector:

Here are some cool blogs from elsewhere on the internet:

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville! In a tight final against Persuasion, the big book about whales managed to win 54 percent of your votes. It was a narrow, but definitive win that makes Moby-Dick the first ever winner of Middlemarch Madness! Call me Surprised! We here at The Span respect the process of democracy and accept that Moby-Dick is the crowned champion, but that doesn’t mean we necessarily agree with the voting public. 

Here to weigh in are Brandy, Kelsey, and David Roth. No one wished to speak for Persuasion: 

Kelsey: Furious with the impending results of Middlemarch Madness, I began reading Middlemarch again last week for what is perhaps the fourth or fifth time in my life. Despite having an entire bookshelf of unread books awaiting me, I have returned to this big 19th-century novel with the glee of a small child finding an easter egg in the grass. What is surprising about Middlemarch on every read is not how contemporary the writing feels—that is true for many good 19th-century novels—but how certain Elliot’s voice as a writer and narrator throughout is. She is the one telling you this story, and you listen to it not because it is a fast-paced plot, or even a highly dramatic one, but because you trust her to tell it. She’s insightful and funny and you can tell that she loves the characters she has built even as she points out every single flaw they contain. I hope to live long enough to read it many more times. 

David: The easiest way for me to defend Moby-Dick winning Middlemarch Madness is also the laziest, which is to note that I have not read Middlemarch, and therefore am unable to/excused from having to address the comparison between the two. I am sure Middlemarch is very good, and based on the summary I just read it sure seems like it is also good in the way that Moby-Dick is good—sprawling and concerned with everything, funnier than expected, a perspective on one uneasy and unfinished era written in another, by an author who is brilliant and uncompromising and weird in ways that made their life complicated. But all I can really tell you about here is Moby-Dick, which is the book of that broad description that I have read, and which I love dearly. I am not a big re-reader of books as a general rule—I have too much catching up to do, always, to have the time for that—but I have read Moby-Dick three times, most recently for a DRAB roundtable back in 2024, and have found new and wonderful things in every re-reading. I love how loopy and tonally confounding it is, and how funny it is, and how you can feel the tension between the commercial adventure that Melville set out to write and the far stranger thing that he was being pulled towards instead; I love how the book that came out of that seems to slip into and out of control from one chapter to the next. I love a masterwork like anyone else, but while Moby-Dick is one of those, it's that thrilling lack of command that I love the most about it. There is still something so unsettled about it, a sense that it is being related by a storyteller who is not just unreliable but half insane. The ambition to tell a story about more-or-less everything is itself a crazy thing, and the book is half-crazed in the attempt. The rest is all delight at chasing that impossible quarry, and at the thrill of doing something so obviously doomed. Maybe Middlemarch is like that, too. I wish more books were.

Brandy: I’m not shocked or even hugely disappointed that Moby-Dick won. It is certainly the best 19th-century novel written by an American and almost as certainly the greatest American novel, full stop. It is, as David notes, much funnier and weirder than you expect. Also much, much hornier, and somehow, despite being famously about whales, even more about whales than you are prepared for a whale novel to be. It is vast in its ambition—oceanic, perhaps. It contains within it both the calm and the tumult of a sea. It still isn’t as good as Middlemarch, which is vaster still and concerns itself with the only real question around: How can one live a life of consequence? Middlemarch is, as Virginia Woolf noted, a novel for grown-ups. If you haven’t read it, please grow up already.