I have this beat-up copy of Moby Dick full of margin notes by students who attended my high school and passed it down or sold it back to the bookstore. Somewhere in the chapter on cetology the phrase “THIS BOOK SUCKS” is written in block letters across the bottom of the page. I didn’t write it, but I remember smiling conspiratorially. At 15, I really did think Moby Dick sucked. Now I think it’s the most beautiful, insightful thing I’ve ever read. The way we read changes.

After college, we’re (hopefully) more open to literature and not put off by the strangeness of Gogol’s galloping troika or the crazy genealogy of Nabakov’s Ada. Moreover, we are willing to feel our way through strange places and unfamiliar times to get to those characters who love and suffer in the same complicated ways that we do. C.S. Lewis said, “We read to know we are not alone,” and people who love books understand that they are not only an adventure, not only an education, but ultimately a comfort because they let us know what is poignant about our own life is there in the lives of others.

Many years later, I am starting to realize the way we read keeps changing after the transition from “THIS BOOK SUCKS” to being hopelessly in love with Henry James. You more seasoned and perceptive readers out there have probably already noticed such a transition, but for me it took a recent reading of The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy.

Thomas Hardy needs no review by me. Certainly, there are plenty of high schoolers out there who might think “THIS BOOK SUCKS,” and there’s always that pretentious ass who fancies himself a real iconoclast and will give you five reasons why any great novel isn’t really, but most can agree The Return of the Native is a good read. Hardy brings you into the story through Egdon Heath at dusk, and there you remain until the novel’s end. The heath is “a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity,” and a great place to spend a few days. The writing is gorgeous and so perceptive it often inspires that half-laugh you get when something is not so much funny as spot-on. The thing I really love about this book though, is how Hardy’s characters force the reader to think twice about them.

From the young maid to the grim aunt to the returning native himself, they are more than multi-dimensional—they are unpredictable in the way that characters who represent some general type can never be and real people always are. A tangled love story with oedipal elements and secret rendezvous might sound ready for prime time (or Lifetime), but this one is not nearly so easy or generic. Even impassioned, star-crossed love is subject to scrutiny. When Eustacia Vye summons her lover to the heath for a forbidden encounter, the narrator points out, “Whenever a flash of reason darted like an electric light upon her lover—as it sometimes would—and showed his imperfections, she shivered thus. But it was over in a second, and she loved on. She knew that he trifled with her; but she loved on.”

There was a time when I may have read through that holding on to the idea Eustascia loves on because she loves so deeply. At this point in the novel, it’s established Eustacia is beautiful and brilliant, so it would follow that she loves with passionate perfection, right? But here and elsewhere Hardy begs the reader to be a bit more mature and to ask—is she not a bit self-indulgent? Is it possible that grand passion can be an easy guise for a toxic combination of boredom and vanity? The thought makes me want to re-read a few other novels and re-evaluate a few other characters. Ten years ago I would have responded with a hearty “Never!” to the following question posed by Eustacia: “But do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life—music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that are going on in the great arteries of the world?”

In the context of this novel, however, the answer is yes, and like the answers to so many questions the novel asks, it is not the most exciting, but one that deserves consideration. If you like novels, you may want to try it or try it again. It is a highly readable bit of literature with a refreshingly anti-romantic lesson, and it gives readers a chance to consider how they respond to people they meet on (and off) the page.

The Return of the Native is available for free at Project Gutenberg.