Alas, Smollett left me underwhelmed. Roderick Random is definitely a picaresque novel. It checks all the boxes: a bluff young hero who undergoes outrageous turns of fortune (there's a reason his last name is Random), a goofy sidekick who tries to make the bluff young hero look good, a host of colorful characters along the way, and a perfect woman waiting at the end of it all. But checking the boxes is about as deep as it goes. It's a series of events, a little bit of humor, but not much reason to care.
The main problem is Roderick himself. An orphan mistreated by his grandfather and relatives, his major motivation throughout the book is revenge. He doesn't really care about love, friendship, or even making money -- he just wants to get even. During his stint in the navy under a tyrannical captain, Roderick starts to eek some empathy out of the reader. Under the hardship of the ignorant captain, he matures imperceptibly as he bonds with his messmates in distress, but for the rest of the book, he knocks about with no one but himself in mind. The happy ending is handed to him on a silver platter, and it's very hard to rejoice, especially when his final prosperity comes attended with several last swipes at the people who kept him down. He's not really an anti-hero, but he's certainly not likable.
If there is any redeeming quality here, the widely ranging breadth of the book provides a fairly convincing tableaux of run-of-the-mill humanity: nothing special, no one particularly saintly, villainous, or conflicted, just a bunch of humans trying to get their kicks on life's bumpy highway.
Arbitrary rating: 3 out of 5 outrageous turns of fortune
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