I like big books... sometimes

I do not dislike long novels. By long I mean 400 pages and more.

Some of my favorite novels are long. For instance, China Mieville's The Scar is more than 600 pages long.

I dislike novels that are unnecessarily long, that could be just as good, if not better, if they lost some pages. For instance, China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is about 700 pages long, but it needs to be about half of that.

And it seems like many novels in recent years are too long. This is particularly frustrating for me because I teach literature courses at a university. I teach a course on 20th Century American novels, and I like to end the semester with a recent novel. Even though that means reading something NOT written in the 20th Century, I like to give students an impression of what is happening in American Letters now, so they can compare that with what came before it.

But sometimes finding a recent novel less than 400 pages can be hard. And many students cannot or will not read a novel of that length in one week -- plus, by the end of the semester academic fatigue has set in. Students have readings for other classes, and most of my students work part-time or even full-time. Many of them have families that require their time and attention. Good, shorter novels are very useful in this setting.

For instance, this semester I was hoping to find something with a protagonist about the age of my students, so I read The Idiot by Elif Batuman. It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist last year, and its narrator is a first-year college student facing the dilemmass they could easily relate to: living away from home for the first time; coping with kooky roommates; choosing college classes; searching for significance in all of the strange things authority figures tell her; discovering romance, etc.


I like the protagonist. I like her roommates. I like her observations about college life. She is funny. She is interesting. But does her story need to be 423 pages long? Do I need a third anecdote about her unspoken affections for Ivan? And a fourth? And a fifth? Do I need to know all of the details I am given about other events?

I find myself asking similar questions of many recent novels: Why are you telling me all of this?

One of the best American novels ever is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it manages its greatness in fewer than 200 pages. Some of its greatness probably is the result of that compression. In my American novels class I teach Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, which I also consider one of the greatest American novels, and she tells her story in fewer than 250 pages.

Can I not experience a young woman's first year of university in fewer than 300 pages -- and yet have more intensity and more enjoyment than the same experience narrated in more than 400 pages? Sometimes less is more.

I know epics are by definition big -- they contain many characters, many events, many locations. And the reader expects this. So again, I am not complaining that some novels are long. Some novels need to be long to create their full impact on the reader. But length alone is not a virtue. Only the inclusion of necessary elements is the virtue, and an epic happens to need that length.

However, having just said that about epics, when I see George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones novels, which are thick as bricks, I think to myself, "How good can they be? He hasn't made any choices."

I wonder if this impulse to include everything is similar to a phenomenon some of us know from creative writing workshops. Sometimes creative writing students tell their colleague that a story is too long, that some scenes do not have the desired effect, etc. That author will defend the story's current form by claiming it is based on actual experience. "But that's the way it happened!"

That does not matter. What matters is whether the story works as well as it can.

I think some writers make a similar defense of a story not based on actual events. In this instance, when told to cut something or re-arrange or compress events, they might say, "But this is the way I imagined it!"

That does not matter. Imagining a story is only the beginning of telling it. A novel is a work of art; it is an object, not an event. As an object, it must be shaped. It must be cut and altered. Its pieces must be arranged with the goal of their impact on the reader, not with their fealty to the imaginative experience of the writer.