At the Will of the Body by Arthur W. Frank
Published 1991 · 144 pages · 50,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is At the Will of the Body to read?
At the Will of the Body scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Plain, precise prose without technical apparatus; analytical but not academic.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- Analytical generalizations about illness experience are closely tied to specific autobiographical episodes.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Each chapter carries both personal narrative and conceptual reflection with high economy.
- Narrative indirection: 20 out of 100
- Analytical insights emerge from narrative episodes rather than being stated at the outset.
- Symbolic density: 15 out of 100
- The body and its failures function analytically; the prose is not symbolic.
- Ironic distance: 16 out of 100
- Maintains analytical distance from his own suffering without irony becoming deflection.
- Resolution withholding: 14 out of 100
- Each chapter reaches a measured analytical conclusion from its autobiographical material.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Organized as discrete essays on specific dimensions of illness experience.
How At the Will of the Body is regarded
At the Will of the Body holds a literary regard score of 80 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.