Mark Twain - The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim's Progress

It’s easy to criticize art for being too long, whether literature, film or music. But there are times when the criticism is apt.

In 1869, Mark Twain convinced a San Francisco newspaper to pay his passage on a voyage from New York to the Middle East in exchange for his account of the journey. Thus, the man had hefty deadlines to meet, and this aspect shows itself irritatingly throughout the entirety of “The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; With Descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents and Adventures, as They Appeared to the Author” (even the effin’ title is ridiculous!): egregious padding of passages; tangents on top of tangents; well-known biblical tales retold in detail; irrelevant data and nearly-identical anecdotes repeated throughout 500 unwieldy pages—all of which turn a fun and interesting travel book into an exercise in tedium on par with Joyce’s Ulysses or the collected works of every emo-warrior-poet on MySpace.

When Twain sticks to telling his story, he’s great. As usual, his sardonic wit and singular point of view make many passages delightful to read and he’s at his funniest with his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek. When his party finds the very hole in which Joseph was placed by his brothers, Twain claims that anyone must accept the indisputable nature of the fact since, in 1,800 years, no one has proved it wasn’t that hole. When his party comes across the One True Cross in the Holy Lands, he declares it the best of all the One True Crosses he has seen in cathedrals throughout Europe. But these moments of levity are often in the minority, stranded miles apart between unnecessary recountings of stagecoach rides through the Old West and musings on the depth of Lake Tahoe.

As a journal-keeping exercise in tracking first impressions and mood swings across the rocky emotional landscape of extended travel, this book is great. But as a story designed to captivate and entertain, its failings are obvious. Though I’m glad to have read it, given that I appropriated the title for a blog long ago, I can’t recommend The Innocents Abroad to anyone. When a book can stand to lose 150 pages without altering the story in the slightest, it officially qualifies as too damn long.