Eight million words later I wonder what I see in Anthony Trollope. 

                  Have I read any author more? Dickens maybe – the four million words in his novels twice. Shakespeare maybe – have I read his whole opus through nine times? Could be, over the years. 

                  Eight million words translates into a thousand hours. With how many souls have you passed a thousand waking hours, other than family? Time is affection’s essential ingredient. Fast love seldom lasts.

                  I’ve written reams about Shakespeare, Dickens, others, trying to comprehend our bond. Of Trollope, nary a word. What was there to say? I just loved the guy, returned to him as a yo-yo to its finger. Can’t remember most of his plots and characters – they blend into a pleasant sameness. But the warmth I can’t forget – as if on a solitary rainy day curled by the fire. 

                  Rounding out my second run-through of his Barchester novels (this time, being read to – deliciously – by Timothy West), it came to me: Trollope comforts because his characters and predicaments remind me of me and mine. 

                  Nothing in a Dickens novel and little in Shakespeare’s plays mimics my experience. Theirs are exaggerated dream characters of heroic or preposterous proportions. Lear, Lady Macbeth, Pickwick and Miss Havisham may remind us of human types, but never have we met persons so extreme.

                  Trollope’s crew we encounter daily – in our mirror or inbox. Their goofs and glories resemble ours. None is too beautiful, valiant, villainous; none too vivid. Trollope tracks them with affectionate condescension, as if recounting the doings of neighbors beside a glowing hearth. Anyone he admires he admires sort of; ditto with blame. The worst is hardly worse than a scoundrel, the best no great Shakes.

                  As they muddle through their romances and controversies, we’re convinced things will turn out OK. Trollope’s is an England so prosperous and secure it feels everlasting. The worst fate that can befall is relocation to Australia – or, Heaven help you, America! Our reaction to his tidy scenes is invariably a smile – sad or happy; no white-knuckle suspense, explosive exuberance, tragic regret.

                  His prose style is a gentle river that never dreams of overflowing its tended banks. His effects seldom startle. On the rare occasions he tries to write a tad fancy, we squirm at the awkwardness. Meanwhile, Shakespeare and Dickens are reinventing their means and scenes on every page.

            Trollope’s prose flows as seamlessly as his plots. In his posthumously published Autobiography, he famously details his daily writing routine. "It was my practice,” he wrote, “to be at my table every morning at 5:30 A.M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy…. My custom [was] to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went.” If you’re a writer, those sentences make you gulp. A thousand words an hour, non-stop! My pace is a third of that – and my muse often truant.

                  I return to Trollope, I realize, for his security. He doesn’t wake and shake me into self-scrutiny. Greater authors make greater demands: they search your soul. I squirm and cringe before my paragons. In Trollope’s company I relax. Neither as artist nor moralist does he tax or attack. He makes me feel a good fellow, all things considered – at least no worse than most.

                  The endless availability of Trollope soothes in this anxious hour. He published a mere sixty-eight books. He is my cabin hideout in the woods, far from the roar of guns.