I guess, if I were to continue with my ongoing attempt to capture the gist of a large work in just one paragraph, I would agree with those who contend that Tom Jones more than anything (and there's certainly a lot to parse) is an extraordinary example of literary form and structure. If, on a very dispassionate level, you can characterize a novel as deliberately designing intersections between tone, character, theme, voice, language, plot, humor, social criticism, showmanship, temperament, morality, tension, and reader response (among many other things) such that the whole stands many multitudes above the sum of its parts, then I'd argue that Fielding manages to reach fairly high multitudes by finessing a very intricate, very subversive set of levers. An example: many of the characters are marked by their behavioral contradictions, which is, of course, a depiction of human nature—Tom Jones, for one, strives to behave according to the highest of moral ideals, and yet he also just can't help fucking. But it's very difficult to get a reader to accept the many conflicting, prismatic sides of human nature inside fictional narratives that only properly function when they accede to demands for cleanliness, clarity, and compression. So Fielding makes sure you understand the rules of his work follow a realistic "history" and not a fantastic "fiction", choosing to center his history on "a heroic bastard". To this end, he has an unusually transparent, sincere, and sometimes snarky narrator/author lead the way—"I'm a flawed, vain human trying to write this book the best I can, so maybe you'll better understand a group of flawed characters who also don't quite know where they're going." So the comic meta narrative, already, is more than just a cheap novelty: it's designed to encircle a wider swath of human nature than an audience is probably accustomed to. As for why, you eventually learn that the reason the book focuses so intently on capturing the nuances, contradictions, missteps, misinterpretations, perplexities, and grotesqueries of human nature is to make the thematic case that forgiveness is perhaps more essential, if not primarily essential, to our shared existence than we realize. While that's far too oversimplified, the point is that this grand moral is difficult to credibly convey without having previously arranged all the right formal levers in just the right way—a fundamentally moral story, in the wrong hands, could easily be a plodding, preachy slog (or, conversely, a distraction-laden joke fest.) That the juggling of such a high number of technical mechanics (also includes a discursive, soap opera-esque narrative, more telling than showing, frequent narrator interjections, meditations on storytelling, literary and philosophical references, an odd limited omniscience, an odd sort of comedic restraint) in such a large, (seemingly) unwieldy tome results in such a delightfully entertaining read is pretty remarkable, though I suspect there are legions of high school students out there who would disagree. To that point, I suppose it's hard, without a wealth of experience, to recognize and be charmed by the many concrete depictions of human nature within if all you're really running with is a set of inchoate ideals—whatever they may be—imposed upon you from on high. Which is funny, since the book is primarily concerned with human nature and morality, and how human nature and morality are hopelessly, inextricably intertwined—the majority of its nearly 900 pages concern itself with depicting both human nature and morality in frank detail—and how it's difficult, perhaps impossible, and even probably extraordinarily damaging, to concern yourself with one without ever bothering to understand the other. Yet here we are. Five stars.