Your Book Review: The History And Adventures Of An Atom

[This is one of the finalists in the 2026 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

I find, Gentlemen, when you read with me in private, that nine out of ten of you dislike the 18th century and all its literary works. As for the Women students, they one and all abominate it.

— Arthur Quiller-Couch, “Of Selection” (1918)

All eighteenth-century novels are weird in one way or another, if only because the novelists of the time didn’t yet know a standard by which to make them not-weird. Robinson Crusoe (1719) famously has no chapter breaks. Tristram Shandy (1767) famously contains a blank page, with instructions for readers to “call for pen and ink” and hack out a portrait of one of the characters on their own. The Man of Feeling (1771) is hardly a novel at all: An anonymous “editor” explains how a fat curate of his acquaintance had used torn pages from a small memorandum book as wadding paper while hunting; the few surviving pages of that memorandum, representing the scattered observations of an eccentric parishioner, make up the slim novel The Man of Feeling. It’s pretty weird.

But one eighteenth-century novel is weirder than the rest. It is, in fact, by my estimation, weirder than any book written before Modernists of the twentieth-century started pushing the (riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay) weird envelope. That champion is Tobias Smollett’s 1769 The History and Adventures of an Atom, a book of exquisite beauty and mind-numbing tedium, of obscurity and libel, featuring some top-notch humorous set-pieces and also really a lot of gratuitous filth.

In the course of this review I’d like to step back and see how novels in general had reached a point at which Atom became possible; quickly touch upon Smollett’s career to find why he found Atom necessary; and only then delve into what makes Atom so weird. If you have no interest in the history of the novel, or of one random Scotsman, but you do want to learn about what it was like inside a medieval Japanese politician’s butthole, skip to part 3. That’s where the Atom resides.

Part 1: A Brief History of the Novel

Proof that the novel is a minor art form: The Romans were better at it than the Greeks.

— Francis Viets, Thoughts Timely and Un (1972).

Don Quixote (1605–1615) is often called (e.g.g. here, here, and here) the first modern novel…which is weird because of course Don Quixote is about a man who is obsessed with reading fiction. DQ is, in fact, a parody or fusion of two kinds of fiction, the romance and the picaresque. A romance is (broadly speaking) a book about a knight wandering around fighting dragons etc. and having martial adventures¹. A picaresque (broadly speaking) is about a lowlife wandering around having comical misadventures; Huckleberry Finn (1884) would be a notable American example. The main joke of Don Quixote is that the Don thinks he’s in one kind of book and he’s actually in the other.

So how can Don Quixote be the first modern novel when both picaresques and romances by necessity must predate it? Do they not count as novels?

A lot of weight is borne by the word modern. In the first place, the novel (as a concept) is old enough that isolating the first novel qua novel is literally impossible. Doubtless the first novel ever written has not survived. Prose fiction is as old as the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, although it was generally fairly short at the time. The Greek examples, from around two thousand years ago, are longer…but are they long enough? Various writing guides will give a minimum word count for a novel (40k or 50k words), but how do those numbers translate into ancient Greek?

The real problem is that, word count aside, no one can authoritatively define the rubric that covers short stories, novellas, and novels—all of what we might call fiction. You know it when you see it, as Potter Stewart would say. The basic elements—that it must be a prose narrative that is not true—are clear enough, but Parnassus is littered with examples of such narratives that don’t feel particularly like our idea of fiction—that do not seem, for lack of a better word, novelistic. I think the average reader, if handed a pre-DQ picaresque (such as Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)) or a pre-DQ romance (such as Amadis the Gaul (1508)), would have a hard time calling each a novel. They are clearly prose narratives, and the events in them are presumably false (Amadis esp. o.c.; sorcerers etc.)—but somehow that’s not enough.

(The most famous prose romance in English—Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) starts off sounding like a (fictional) history and ends almost novelistically. Reading it through is like reading Return of the King backwards, starting with the appendix.)

Some of the things (I’ll call them points of alienation) that make sixteenth-century protonovels strange to modern eyes survive two hundred years or so past Don Quixote’s publication. They survive, in fact, up to and into (remember Smollett?) the writings of Tobias Smollett. They’re part of what makes eighteenth-century novels weird. Maybe you can come up a dozen points of alienation, but I’ll quickly name three:

1 Misemphasis

Early narratives—protonovel or novel—tend to place emphasis on the wrong (or “wrong”) things, or at least in the wrong proportions. In Thomas Nashe’s picaresque The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), for example, we find [CW for everything, because Nashe] the following four entirely conventional and novelistic incidents:

1 A murderer named Esdras rapes Heraclide (“a noble & chaste matrone”).

2 Heraclide, in shame, commits suicide.

3 Jack Wilton (the narrator and eponymous unfortunate traveler) is falsely accused of rape and murder. He is tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He is marching up to the gibbet to be hanged, when…

4 …the testimony of a passing Englishman frees him.

Nothing unusual here. But how long does it take the book to narrate these four incidents?

1a Heraclide begs Esdras for mercy: 4 ½ pages

1b The rape: The first half of a sentence

2a Heraclide ponders suicide: 2 ½ pages

2b The suicide: Two parenthetical words (“(throughlie stabd)”)

3 Jack Wilton accused, tried, sentenced, brought to the gibbet: ½ page

4a The Englishman’s testimony, which saves Jack’s neck: 1 page

4b The Englishman then spontaneously monologues on the folly of travel because all countries, save England, are trash: 6 pages

Then the Englishman slips away, never to appear again, leaving Jack Wilton a free man. One page later, Jack has fallen into the clutches of Jews (!) who appear to be planning to dissect him alive for the elucidation of medical students. It goes on like this. It’s all a recognizable picaresque except the pacing, which seems so strange and arbitrary that the result rarely reads like a novel.

2 Discontinuity

Something romances and picaresques have in common is that they are made up of a character doing one damn thing after another. Lazarillo de Tormes is going to bounce from one crime to the next and Amadis is going to ride from one chivalrous adventure to the next without much regard for sequence. The incidents, like the lines of a ghazal, are pearls on a string. Of course, such a description applies equally well to Don Quixote—or to Huckleberry Finn again—or to any number of novels (Moll Flanders, Candide, Jack Kerouac). It’s also often a good description of, you know, real life. Look at the way someone from the old pre-DQ days describes his life; look at (selected mostly at random, based on what shelves I can reach from the couch) the writings of fourteenth-century Florentine merchant Buonaccorso Pitti.

Now, partway through his memoir, Pitti begins a short paragraph with the sentence: “On reaching Florence I resolved to get married,” and the paragraph thereafter moves rapidly into his betrothal to an (unnamed here) woman and finally ends that he “married her on 12 November of the same year” (viz. 1391).—This is followed by a paragraph on how Pitti was struck by lightning “one day before my marriage” (he recovers quickly).—After that comes a paragraph about how “before my marriage” some ships of English wool he’d purchased came to various Italian ports. I’m not criticizing either the writing or the life of Buonaccorso Pitti; I’m just saying that this is a natural way to live and to view one’s life. It’s not the only way, of course; certainly Augustine’s autobiography features a conventional redemption plot. But a modern novelist given this material would inevitably try to tie if not the wool than at least the lightning strike into the wedding. It’s a great complication! But it is also the most canonically random of events. This randomness would become anathema to the novelist.

But not yet.

3 Digression

Man did old novels have a lot of digressions. Readers of Frankenstein (1818) will remember the chapters spent by the monster eavesdropping on a family with a melodramatic and baroque history—but 1818 is a little late for a digression of this length, which is much more common in the centuries before².

In Don Quixote, a character one night picks up a book in an inn—and Cervantes pauses to print the entirety of the book (forty-one pages, in my edition of DQ). In Apuleius’ Golden Ass (ca. 170?)—not the earliest novel, as the earliest novel is, you will recall, unrecoverable from the quicksands of time, but the earliest complete surviving novel that is actually good (as opposed to fun)—the middle fifth or so is devoted to the story (narrated by an old woman in a den of thieves) of Cupid and Psyche…essentially the Beauty and the Beast story, only with Roman gods.

These digressions can involve extreme tonal shifts. In Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743), a satirical novel about London thieves, one character disappears from the story for a span. When she returns, she explains that she had been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa and only after many hardships (mostly involving sailors, natives, and hermits propositioning her) was she able to make it back to England. This narrative of adventure on another continent takes up four nonconsecutive chapters, and after that we’re back to a comical story of the London underworld.

Smollett committed one of the most audacious or flagrant digressions in English letters in his second novel, Peregrine Pickle (1751). During one of his many misadventures, our hero Peregrine encounters an unnamed “lady of quality” who, in the manner of characters from an eighteenth-century novel, proceeds to tell him her story. Said story makes up chapter LXXXI of Pickle. Nothing unusual here…

…except the story is ostensibly true, the lady a real anonymous lady (history has identified her as Francis Vane), and if Vane did not pen her own narrative, neither did Smollett. Vane or her ghostwriter gets a chapter in Pickle, and this was, in fact, a selling point of the book (the account is suitably scandalous, the secret identity of the “lady of quality” an exciting mystery). Pickle was advertised as containing “A Memoir of a Lady of Quality” like a bonus feature. Even people who found Pickle too coarse or irreverent praised the interpolated memoir, which was, one contemporary magazine³ raved, “Most elegantly wrote⁴, and greatly outshines the rest of the work.” Certainly the memoir is unlike anything else in this picaresque novel about an impish prankster who gets 1. his comeuppance and 2. the girl.

In my edition of Peregrine Pickle, chapter LXXXI takes up a full 108 pages.

And so…

I guess Don Quixote makes a convenient Schelling point for the imprimatur of first modern novel…in part because it is self-aware and self-reflexive in a way earlier novels or protonovels are not, in part because all later novelists, at least into the nineteenth century, would see it as a forebear. But DQ does not represent a real rupture with the books that came before it. In fact there is no real rupture. There’s only a superabundance or lack of the three abovelisted points of alienation.

Most fiction of the seventeenth century, and arguably all earlier fiction, has these points in sufficient quantities that the books end up feeling un-novelistic. In English: Euphues (1571) or The Blazing World (1666) (and all between) I would call protonovels.

But as time progresses, the ratio of non-novelistic elements to novelistic elements start to tip in favor of the novel. The emphasis falls more naturally; digressions gradually lighten; plot comes to the fore. Perhaps by Oroonoko (1688), and certainly by Robinson Crusoe (1719), we reach, for the English novel, a tipping point. Eighteenth century novels are weird., but they are least novels.

(O.c., twentieth-century and later novelists have felt free to toggle the ratios back. If we held more recent novels to the standards of old ones, a good half of Italo Calvino’s canon would be kicked out of the fiction section of the bookstore.)

Part 2: A Brief History of Smollett

I think the world would be better off if I could tell a strange woman, met at a church social, that I have diarrhoea.

— H.L. Mencken, letter to Theodore Dreiser (1918).

Tobias Smollett trained as and intermittently tried to make a living as a doctor. Several of his characters are doctors or at least con artists masquerading as doctors, and his books never hesitate to break into complicated medical jargon when the opportunity presents itself. But one foot was always in the world of letters, and despite some ups and downs, this was the world that would bring him what is conventionally called immortality.

He worked for it! Smollett wrote incessantly: plays, pamphlets, translations of Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Voltaire’s “Micromegas,” and (his great success, at least from a pecuniary standpoint) the multivolume Complete [!] History of England—in addition to his editorial work—but of course we are here to talk about his novels. The History and Adventures of an Atom was his fifth, of six…

• The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748)

• The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751)

• The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753)

• The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1761)

• The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769)—that’s what we’re talking about!

• The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)

…and by far his most obscure as well as being his strangest.

Smollett’s early novels are almost paradigmatically picaresque. His heroes bounce from one scrape to another in a manner that often appears improvised. It is almost impossible to convey the sheer amount of incident that he crammed into these novels. Have a look at this chapter heading, which summarizes the contents of the first chapter of the second volume of Roderick Random. (For context: Roderick (the narrator) is sailing from Jamaica as a surgeon’s mate; Crampley is first mate.) The chapter header:

“We depart for Europe—a misunderstanding arises between the Captain and the Surgeon, through the scandalous aspersions of Crampley—the Captain dies—Crampley tyrannises over the surgeon, who falls a Victim for his Cruelty—I am also ill-used—the Ship strikes—the behaviour of Crampley and the Seamen on that occasion—I get on shore, challenge the Captain to single combat—am treacherously knocked down, wounded, and robbed”

By my count, that’s two deaths (the captain and the surgeon), a shipwreck, a general mutiny, a fight on a lifeboat (barely alluded to in the summary), a bloody duel on the beach, and a robbery—all in five pages. The chapter takes up five pages. That’s five pages out of 541.

These early Smollett novels possess a kind of trajectory among them. Roderick Random, hero of the first, is a bit of a hothead, but he’s mostly a decent guy by the standards of the time. Peregrine Pickle, hero of the second, is more mischievous in a way that frequently crosses any sober line: As a child he secretly bores holes in his aunt’s chamber pot⁵ ; as an adult he sets up a fake psychic in part to milk the credulous but also for his own amusement. Amusement clearly justifies a lot of sins for Peregrine Pickle. And then there’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (not a real count; a fraud); he’s just a bad person.

But it’s in Fathom that Smollett takes the picaresque somewhere unusual. As he travels through the Netherlands on his way to England, Fathom comes across a Castilian who (as is the custom with newly met characters in a picaresque) relates to Fathom his heart-tugging backstory, an extremely melodramatic tale of tragedy and misfortune, the upshot of which is that he, the Castilian, has been falsely branded a traitor and is being hunted across the continent by agents of Spain. The amount of superfluous detail (estrangement, revenge, murder—the melodrama is there!) in his account is extraordinary and apparently irrelevant. All Fathom needs know is that the Castilian is a wanted man, begging for assistance.

So Fathom feigns friendship, robs the Castilian of all his goods and flees, leaving the poor wretch “to the horrors of indigence, and the additional agony of this fresh disappointment.”

The scene is, as written, one of the funniest in Smollett’s canon—despite Fathom’s general caddish and rotten nature, it defies all expectation that he would violate the rules of narrative so willfully; that he would avoid, in other words, a story-hook. But there goes Fathom, hopping a ship to London laden with Spanish gold. A chapter heading ironically labels this incident “a flagrant instance of Fathom’s virtue.”

Annnnd then…Smollett spoils the joke. Some hundred-plus pages later, the Castilian reappears in the narrative. In fact, one by one, the various people Fathom has robbed, deceived, and debauched now start to reappear. Now he faces consequences for his many crimes. The plot points strewn so haphazardly in the first half of the book are rolled up, katamari-style, in the second. Even the superfluous details of the Castilian’s narrative all turn out, now, to be relevant.

Smollett has committed the cardinal sin of the picaresque. He has tortured it into a plot.

I’m not claiming that Smollett invented the concept of a plot in 1753. Fielding’s Tom Jones had come out four years earlier. You can find a plot in Hamlet (etc. obv.) or Gawain and the Green Knight or any number of short pieces (Aesop’s fables; Decamera). But certainly in Fathom Smollett invents the plot for himself. No previous novel that I know so resolutely demonstrates its embarrassment at formlessness, nervously tying up or snipping off its loose ends. Fathom doesn’t quite get all of them, but of course it’s a rare novel with no superfluities. A story feels more organic if it has a little dither. Picaresques are all dither, and Smollett would never be able to let himself dither so thoroughly again.

Smollett still had three novels in him after Fathom, but what he lacked was a place to go next. Launcelot Greaves is a pastiche of Don Quixote (which, recall, Smollett had translated) with an ambiguously crazed Englishman donning armor and tussling with corrupt government officials. It’s not very good.

Then comes Atom, an anomaly in any oeuvre.

And then Humphrey Clinker, an epistolary novel. Something funny had happened to the novel in the years (nearly two decades!) between Fathom and Clinker. Laurence Sterne had written A Sentimental Journey and Horace Walpole had written The Castle of Otranto, and from now on almost all novels would either be novels of sentiment or novels of gothic horror— a statement that would remain true, with the requisite exceptions, for well over half a century.

Humphrey Clinker is a novel of sentiment. It’s not entirely un-Smolletty, filled as it is with scatological gags, comic characters, and a picaresque journey (the titular expedition)—but it’s certainly his least Smolletty. It’s an epistolary, for Pamela’s sake! And because events therein are treated sentimentally, with pauses for tears, there is much less room to cram in incident after incident. Ferdinand Count Fathom could rob six beggars in the time it takes Clinker’s gouty patriarch to weep over one.

I earmarked a trajectory to Smollett’s early career, a trajectory of increasingly caddish characters, and perhaps his later career shows a kind of desperation over what to do next; after all, it would never do to write a book about a worse person than Fathom! The novels are shorter after Fathom, but come out more slowly. (Smollett is still busy, just with other things than novels; also for a time he was in prison). After Fathom, he tries a character who is mad (and who is largely cribbed from an older, better book), and it didn’t really work. Where was there to go? One option, the Clinker option, would be to lean into it (whatever it is) and write a reg’lar eighteenth century novel.

Sidney or the bush! The other option would be to lean away from it and write something no one’s ever seen before.

This, I assume, is why Smollett wrote The History and Adventures of an Atom. Simply because no one else ever had, and what else, before he fell into conventionality, could he do?

Part 3: The Atom at Last

And yet, if a body of pioneers were set at work upon your skull, they would find rubbish enough to choke up all the common sewers in town.

— Smollett, Peregrine Pickle (1751).

So what is The History and Adventures of an Atom that makes it so different? Any self-respecting book review should feature a plot summary, so I’ll try a plot summary.

In London, a few decades before the present (i.e. 1769) time, a haberdasher learns that an immortal atom resides inside his pineal gland. The atom proves its legitimacy by expounding on Greek etymologies (!) and demands that the haberdasher “take up the pen” and write what the atom tells him “for the benefit of you miserable mortals.” And like a lady of quality or a noble Castilian, what the atom wants to narrate is its own backstory.

This is the frame narrative (actually the book has a second frame narrative in which the haberdasher’s papers are discovered after his death, but it’s short and not even weird), the only one in Smollett’s oeuvre. The rest of the book, up to the final word—the frame is never returned to, never closed—is the atom’s story in the atom’s words.

That story is about a time, one thousand years previous, when Japan was at war with China. The titular and narrating atom resides in the toenail of the Japanese emperor; but, as the emperor habitually kicks his chief minister in the posterior (a daily ritual!), shortly after the book opens the atom finds itself transferred into the minister’s butthole, there to reside happily for the rest of the book. It will prove to be a most thematically apposite location.

It’s a long trip from Japanese butthole to English pineal gland, but the atom had a full millennium to make it (and it explains at least some of the steps it took, all to establish its bonafides). Clearly the atom has had many histories and adventures it could relate, and only chooses this particular rectum-centric view of an Asian war “for the instruction of British ministers.” Because obviously Smollett knew nearly nothing of Japan. Obviously the Japan presented in the book is so inaccurate that it makes The Mikado look like Genji. Atom is an allegory, or perhaps more precisely a book in code, and some parts of the code are easy: Japan = Britain; China = France; Korea = Spain; the war is the Seven Years’ War, which in 1769 was still a recent memory.

Why would Smollett go to all the trouble of writing a book in code? The man wasn’t taking any chances! Writing could be a dangerous business in the eighteenth century (as in many other centuries, o.c.). No less a light than Daniel Defoe found himself in the stocks after producing a satirical pamphlet against the government⁶. Smollett himself had been convicted for libel (hence his prison stint) in 1759. Atom is a book that, its crypto-Japanese veneer stripped away, asserts quite baldly that the king is the reincarnation of a goose fart. It’s only a joke, but presumably it is a libelous joke. And so Smollett insisted that he was not criticizing an English king, but an ancient Japanese emperor. He also published the book (take no chances!) anonymously and (take no chances!) while living in Italy!

The politician with the atom in his rectum comes with the pseudo-Japanese (more pseudo than Japanese) name Fika-kaka, but contemporary readers were to perceive that Fika-kaka is or stands for the Duke of Newcastle. The Earl of Hardwicke appears as Sti-Phi-Rum-Poo. Tories and Whigs are, respectively, (“the people of Japan had been long divided between two inveterate parties”) Shit-Tilk-Ums-Heit and Shi-Hit-Kums-Hi-Til. One difficulty with reading Atom in 2026 is that the book not only sports ridiculous scatalogical names that are difficult to remember or tell apart, but these names clefly represent other people, and those people we’ve never heard of. Unless you have a doctorate in eighteenth-century British political history, every character so carefully encoded and obscured in the book will be an unknown, with a few notable exceptions—Pitt, Frederick the Great, Georges II & III, at least one of whom I more deduced the existence of than heard of. Even with a key (several circulated in the eighteenth century, not always in agreement) before them, readers are in the unenviable position of decoding Lob-Kob as Richard Grenville-Temple, and then quickly googling Richard Grenville-Temple just to understand what is going on.

What is going on is usually something involving butts or poop. The atom is quite literally rectum-centered, after all. Fika-kaka suffers from a chronically itchy anus (“immanis αιδοῑων pruritus” Smollett helpfully glosses the condition, because of course he does) and almost the first thing we learn about him is his habit of smearing his anus with cream and letting a tomcat lick it off, all to assuage the terrible itching. Before too many pages have passed, Fika-kaka has moved beyond tomcats. Ass-kissing, which Smollett treats as the conventional political metaphor, is also treated as a literal event, and described in terms both repulsive and so pedantic as to be almost unrecognizable. Here’s Smollett:

“The osculation itself was soft, warm, emollient, and comfortable; but when the nervous papillae were gently stroaked, and as it were fondled by the long, elastic, peristaltic, abstersive fibres that composed this reverend verriculum, such a delectable titillation ensued, that Fika-ka was quite in raptures.” The verriculum, by the way, is, here, a beard. Fika-kaka (Fika-ka is just a nickname, or a typo) chooses his ministers based on the colors of their beards, because “beards of different colours yielded him different degrees of pleasure in the friction we have described.” At one point he is “seized with an orgasm of pleasure, analogous to that which characterises the extacy of love”—in case the other passages were too subtle for you.

It quickly becomes clear that the only person more anally obsessed than Fika-kaka is Tobias Smollett. The first fart joke in this novel appears in the second paragraph of the editor’s preface; it will not be the last.

There is some precedent (eighteenth century fiction is weird) for Atom. The 1760 novel Chrysal is narrated by a coin, which passes through many hands-cum-adventures; it even ends with a fart! The newspaper Adventurer ran a short piece (presumably by John Hawkesworth) in 1752 narrated by a transmigrating soul currently residing in a flea⁷. But the main inspiration for Atom—other than Smollett’s splenetic contempt for every political leader, British or otherwise, he can think of⁸ — is nothing so current. Smollett is everywhere responding to and competing with the specter of François Rabelais, the fifteenth-century French proto-novelist. Rabelais had Gargantua wipe his butt with a live goose, so Smollett has Fika-kaka try “a beaver, a hen, a cock, a chicken, a calf-skin, a hare-skin, a pigeon, a cormorant, a lawyer’s bag, a lamprey [!],” etc. I assure you. Rabelais filled his works with mock excesses of erudition, medical terminology (Rabelais was also a doctor), and absurd neologisms, so Smollett must try the same tricks. To Rabelais’s Greek and Latin, Smollett adds an occasional smattering of genuine Japanese (gleaned, apparently, from the 65-volume An Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time, which Smollett had edited in part, and had reviewed the Japanese volume of). “I might here launch into a very learned dissertation [on the etymology of abracadabra],” the atom threatens in the middle of a 1600-word learned dissertation (a digression!) on the history of magic in general.

And among the subjects the atom is learned in (a lot of etymologies, really), one might add…Rabelais himself. The atomic narrator knows its Rabelais well and cites him several times. The atom is in fact very literate, dashing off references to Shakespeare, the Latin poets, and (esp.) Cervantes: When describing how famine had come to the island [Britain/Japan], the atom mentions how the William Pitt analog “contrived a method to be spared the expense of solid food…He employed his emissaries to blow up the patients à posteriori, as the dog was blown up by the madman of Seville, recorded by Cervantes. The individuals thus inflated were seen swaggering about the streets, smooth and round, and sleek and jolly.” You’ll notice the atom not only managed to tip its hat to Don Quixote, it tipped while keeping its beloved anus-theme at the fore.

And more importantly, it’s a good gag! Smollett improved upon Cervantes here. I don’t know enough about William Pitt to assert he’d blow wind up your ass to persuade you you weren’t hungry, but surely it’s something a politician, in our crudest imaginations at least, would do. And it’s a genuinely funny image. A lot of Atom is a slog to get through, but it has its filthy rewards. Sometimes it’s just the sheer Swiftian hostility Smollett has towards the great men of his day: He characterizes George II (e.g.) as “rapacious, shallow, hot-headed and perverse; in point of understanding, just sufficient to appear in public without a slavering bib.” And sometimes it’s a solid joke. My favorite—it’s not even scatological—comes when James Keith saves Frederick the Great…excuse me, I mean when Yam-a-Kheit saves Brut-an-tiffi from the fruits of his own incompetence and perishes in the effort. Brut-an-tiffi, after the manner of emperors, immediately heaps the blame for the situation not on himself but on his savior Yam-a-Kheit. Smollett’s (or the atom’s) gloss on the situation is delightful:

“’Tis an ill wind that blows nobody good:—the same disaster that deprived him of a good officer, afforded him the opportunity to shift the blame of neglect from his own shoulders to those of a person who could not answer for himself.”

That, I think, is cruel but true enough that it should be remembered in the annals of eighteenth-century humor alongside Lilliput’s war over egg-cracking or Tristram Shandy slamming his dick in a window sash⁹. So sometimes Atom gets is larfs in. And naturally the prose, which sometimes yoyos its way into ludicrous incomprehensibility, also yoyos back into ludicrous fun and a kind of beauty: Pitt, “opening the flood-gates of his abuse, bespattered all that opposed him.” Or: When Pitt is kicked in the rear by the king (as was the royal custom) Smollett renders it: “Turning his face from the emperor, [he] received such a salutation on the os sacrum that the parts continued vibrating and tingling for several days.” No one has ever claimed Smollett’s writing isn’t exuberant.

As a novel, of course, Atom is terrible. The characters never become characters—nor are they really meant to, as character in Atom is merely a matter of adjustments along two sliding scales marked “knave” and “fool.” This is the only Smollett novel where not a single personage, even the atom, is memorable or interesting. The plot is of course desultory, restricted as it is to retelling, in obscured form and with the most cynical and scatalogical spin, recent history. The book ends some eight pages and five years after the late war’s conclusion, and it ends abruptly, promising “a new storm in another quarter” that is never followed up on (but which is, in context, the contemporary unrest in the American colonies; the Boston Massacre dropped less than a year after Atom’s publication). It reads like a protonovel, and had it been written earlier in the century, or by someone who was not, otherwise, a novelist, it’s probable that it would not be considered a novel at all.

I’d say it’s the kind of book a reader should skim, except Smollett’s dense prose in this book is (as I learned as I flipped back through looking for the best fart jokes) almost unskimmable. If you do decide to read Atom, I would highly recommend getting the Day and Brack edition from the University of Georgia Press (1989), which features extensive (over twice the length of the text proper) annotations and context, as a lot of the book will make no sense without them.

Or…the other option is to ignore all the British politics and clever parallels and read Atom as a ridiculous fantasy novel in which warlords with absurd names must literally (e.g.) tame a many-headed monster named Legion with bowls of blood. Who cares if Legion is supposed to be the House of Commons? You had me at bowls of blood!

A note on sources

For page count purposes, I used this edition of Unfortunate Traveller, this edition of Roderick Random, the Penguin Classics edition of Fathom (1990), and the Oxford English Novels edition of Peregrine Pickle (Oxford UP, 1964).

My Don Quixote is the Edith Grossman translation (HarperCollins 2003). Pitti’s memoir appears in Gene Bruckner, ed., Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence (Harper Torchbooks, 1967).