Why do people write such long novels?

[Eric]

In the 19th century there was no TV. Even now, we all like to get into a novel whose characters we like, and hope it will go on forever. But I wonder why it is that so many novelists nowadays shun concision and write novels between 500 and 1,000 pages in length. Does the plot always merit so much space, or do many of these these novels err on the side of bagginess?

[saliotthomas]

Like War and peace, Anna Karenina,the red and black, ....?

This question is a forum classic,seen it a good few times.

I wonder why?

[Igu Soni]

Maybe because, now that psychology has become an open explicit language, people feel they ought to explain the characters better.
Maybe it's because of the "show, don't tell" idea coupled with the last.
Maybe it's the idea of verisimilitude.

Personally, it seems like it's a combination of all three, and probably a few more.

[nnyhav]

Why do people post so many questions in chat forums?

Never mind, it's not important.

[beelzebubbles]

Conciseness is only a virtue in those that bore us.
--J.L. McClelland

[Bottle Rocket]

Seems to me that there's a bell curve, and for every encyclopedic novel there is a terse one on the other end, with the vast majority somewhere right near the middle. So for every portmanteau manuscript (a Proust, a Pynchon, a David Foster Wallace) you can find a corresponding opposite (Marguerite Duras, Aharon Appelfeld, etc.), and thus it is really a stylistic choice on the author's part (with, one hopes, constructive criticism and decent editing.)

And there are as many kinds of long novels as there are authors -- is A la Recherche du Temps Perdu one work or a literary edifice built of a dozen-odd books with elements in common? What about, say, Infinite Jest, whose style and length are in themselves comments on information hierarchies, the explosion of ideas we have to assimilate in the digital era, and the ADD-quality of smart, driven young burnouts-in-the-making. When I read The Magic Mountain, I was pretty doubtful about the dozens of pages devoted to properly folding your blanket while taking the sun every day -- but eventually I came to see that Mann had used this leisurely manner to turn the reader him-or-herself into Hans Castorp adapting in this hothouse world. And some stories simply require a very great deal of telling, whether it tries to capture a stream of consciousness or chronicle a family. I think of John Updike as being pretty average in the length of any individual book, but the Rabbit Angstrom story took a number of volumes to complete.

In commercial fiction, it's a largely different set of rules -- Stephen King writes long and millions of readers wouldn't have it any other way; same with, say, Tom Clancy, or (in my own youth) James Michener. But despite the occasional nod to King, nobody would consider Clancy or Michener as "art;" it's entertainment.

There aren't many books, in my experience of publishing and reading, that would not profit by careful, candid editing, but many authors resist editing (and some editors have a grandiose view of themselves, like Gordon Lish, who edited Raymond Carver -- an amazing story reviewed this Sunday in the New York Times Book Review)

However, at least here in the US, line editing is a dying art ... I've noticed a number of copy-editors posting here, too -- the contributions and queries of a good copy editor are priceless, and not acknowledged nearly often enough.


BRocket

[Eric]

I'm glad that Bottle Rocket is taking my query seriously. I am not against suites of novels, and large things otherwise chopped up into digestible portions (Dickens, George Eliot, etc.). I greatly enjoyed reading the twelve novels by Anthony Powell, read one after the other. (I have not read the Proust.) What I am driving-hinting at is the number of rather off-putting tomes of huge proportions, where you begin to wonder whether the author genuinely knows where he (it is usually a "he") is going, as opposed to trying to hold the attention of the reader for as long as possible, so that he won't have to do unpleasant things, like become an estate agent, travel the world, or commit suicide.

As well as Powell, I liked Mann's "Magic Mountain", because there was a hermetic world described there. But I feel that nowadays, there are too many unstable authors masquerading as postmodernist explorers, and who in fact throw in a series of short-stories, reams of popular science, and a number of other desperate things, and call this a "novel", even though the hopeful reader then has to plough through many pages, only to find that the author was not really skilled enough to round off his wanderings.

I think that copy editors are invaluable. The sheer enthusiasm, and sometimes hubris and self-obsession, of an author can make him continue an idea of near genius for so long that he evokes yawns and promises never again to read anything by him. And editor can discreetly rescue a potentially good author from his own demon of loquacity.

[Jayaprakash]

In too many cases the answer seems to be: Not enough to say, and insufficient wit to realise it.

[Rakesh Patel]

It's a surprise that Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993) is one of the longest novels in English ever written!

[Bottle Rocket]

Originally Posted by Eric

I'm glad that Bottle Rocket is taking my query seriously. I am not against suites of novels, and large things otherwise chopped up into digestible portions (Dickens, George Eliot, etc.). I greatly enjoyed reading the twelve novels by Anthony Powell, read one after the other. (I have not read the Proust.)

Many of my favorite books are very long -- I loved Gravity's Rainbow once I got used to Pynchon's ways, and it's on my short list of post-WW2 literature, although sometimes he's a little too quirky or fey for my taste. However, I think the book really needs to be that long to create its effect, a unique combination of play and absurdist humor that in the end creates an atmosphere of paranoia and dread. I happen to know rather a lot about the V-2 rocket and the circumstances of its creation and manufacture, and I was impressed that he got it all right, down to throwaway comments about details of the weapon's engineering. But other Pynchon meganovels (eg. Mason & Dixon and Against the Day) didn't really engage me -- too much work for too little return, at least as far as I got with them. I've read Proust several times, in school and in one of my publishing incarnations, as well as a good deal of Proust criticism; again, I think he required (most of) the narrative space he used. My dad LOVED Proust (I have at least three editions, in both English and French); whereas my mom scorned Proust as "a snob bleeding to death on the page." For myself, I don't really like Proust that much -- I find his characters intensely annoying and his style rather too-too -- but there's no doubt in my mind that like him or not, he is an extraordinary and acute observer whose work is well worth reading.

What I am driving-hinting at is the number of rather off-putting tomes of huge proportions, where you begin to wonder whether the author genuinely knows where he (it is usually a "he") is going, as opposed to trying to hold the attention of the reader for as long as possible, so that he won't have to do unpleasant things, like become an estate agent, travel the world, or commit suicide.

I hope those last two words aren't a snide allusion to Wallace, whose work seems to me all the more accomplished because it was achieved despite sometimes overwhelming psychiatric problems; I share the depression part and know how debilitating it can be, especially for the sort of obsessive, perfectionist omnibus type of writer that DFW was.

As well as Powell, I liked Mann's "Magic Mountain", because there was a hermetic world described there. But I feel that nowadays, there are too many unstable authors masquerading as postmodernist explorers, and who in fact throw in a series of short-stories, reams of popular science, and a number of other desperate things, and call this a "novel", even though the hopeful reader then has to plough through many pages, only to find that the author was not really skilled enough to round off his wanderings.

I agree with you completely, though I suspect the books we would choose as examples might be very different. For instance, I am guessing that you might put William T. Vollmann's work in this category, whereas I am something of a Vollmann fan, although I readily admit that he has his longeuers and a mania for throwing in everything including the kitchen sink. I'll try to think of a few rillyrilly long books that I didn't like; in turn, I wonder what your candidates would be.

I think that copy editors are invaluable. The sheer enthusiasm, and sometimes hubris and self-obsession, of an author can make him continue an idea of near genius for so long that he evokes yawns and promises never again to read anything by him. An editor can discreetly rescue a potentially good author from his own demon of loquacity.

A painter friend of mine once told me that the hardest thing for her was to decide when a canvas was "done." Similarly, a good line editor can give good advice born of long experience, but these days most large-scale houses are ruled by bean-counters for whom books are literally referred to as "product" along with the acquisition editors who make deals but rarely if ever pick up a blue pencil. (When I was a junior-junior at Doubleday thirty years ago, I was amazed to discover that several of the senior editors I worked for never actually read the manuscripts they bought, and just left it all for us kids to do whatever editing was actually ever done. And it has only gotten worse since then.) Copy editors don't typically do that kind of editing (changing major elements like narrative structure or excising parts of an overwritten ms.) but heaven knows they save authors from all kinds of sloppiness and laziness, and are often resented for their trouble. And when an author is too high-and-mighty to take editing you get episodes like the following:

When Lee Uris became a cash cow with books like Exodus and QB VII, he developed a great deal of dollars-and-cents influence over his publisher. He got to taking himself very seriously, and started doing collaborations with his new young trophy wife, who was a photographer. One of their joint efforts was JERUSALEM: City of Gold, a coffee-table book of her photos and his text, a trip through Jewish history in seven-league boots. But he had become such a sacred cow that he refused any editorial intervention; the book was "stet everything" ... and thus there is now a book on Jerusalem and the Jews out there (by a man preoccupied with his Judaism) which contained a paragraph that opened "Jesus was in his rookie year as a rabbi ..." which became my favorite quote of 1982.


BRocket

[kpjayan]

About 15 years back , there was a novel published in Malayalam 'avakAshikaL' by Vilasini. At that time it was something of a sensation. It was published as 4 volumes, totalling about 4000 pages. I believe, the hype helped the sales , and it sit pretty in your bookshelf as "encyclopedia Britannica'. However, I haven't seen many who has read the book completely, and those did advised the rest against it(!).

Wiki has an entry on the longest novels written.
List of longest novels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[slim jenkins]

I was told recently by an aspiring (to be published) novelist that publishers aren't interested in anything much under 100,000 words partly due to the costs of setting up the print/design process...that was his theory.

As I've said elsewhere, I can't face long novels...and would applaud a reverse trend towards brevity. What can't be said in 60-70,000 words? Why do writers think they're so damn talented and interesting as to warrant all that wordage and our valuable time?

[nnyhav]

Are all novels too long? Zadie essays the question and questions the essay.

[Eric]

Ha! Bottle Rocket must be the pseudonym of Werner von Braun. I like the Tom Lehrer refrain: "If rawckets go up, who cares vhere zey come down - zet's not my department, said Werner von Braun". You could go on Mastermind, with special subject "Usedom and its test sites".

I'm glad there are people who read long novels and test the water for the rest of us. Maybe with Pynchon he wrote one brilliant novel, then tried to copy. But I don't know the chronology of his work.

I'm translating an anthology right now with 16 stories in it. That is about 100,000 words long. So I can image how long a 100,000-word novel must be. But some long "novels" are a concatenation of stories, with a slack red thread holding them together.

Nnhav, I'll have to read Zadie Smith's essay at leisure. I presume this is the bit you were referring to:

Even in those familiar lists of "great novels", classics of the genre, and so on, it's hard to find a single "well-made" novel among them, if by well-made we mean something like "evenly shaped, regular, predictable and elegantly designed". Is War and Peace, with its huge tracts of undigested essay, absurd plotting and obscene length, a well-made novel? Is The Trial? And those neat Victorian novels we're now expected casually to revile – is it not only from a distance, and in the memory, that they look as neat as they do? Which of them is truly "well made"? Jane Eyre seemed hysterical and lopsided to its earliest readers; we now think of Middlemarch as the ultimate "proper" novel, forgetting how eccentric and strange it looked on publication, with its unwieldy and unfeminine scientific preoccupations and moral structure borrowed from Spinoza. In our classic novels there always remains something odd, unruly, as distinctly weird as Hardy's Little Father Time.

I already said earlier that the Victorians can be forgiven. In those days there were no radio, TV, films, DVDs, etc. So the baggy novel delighted if well-written. But in our soundbite culture, I cannot tell whether very long novels have something to do with publishing and printing, as Zadie Smith suggests, or are a reaction to the much-neglected short-story, which would seem to fit the age of the soundbite much better.

I note what Slim Jenkins says in #12. It is possible to write a novel of 60,000 words. Most of Nothomb's ones don't drown in verbiage. Long novels spawn long reviews. Concision is the clue, not self-indulgence.

[nnyhav]

One reaction to Zadie's ruminations:
Blographia Literaria: Zadie Smith's Essay on Essays: Off with the Top of Her Head
Blographia Literaria: "The Books at Hand": James Wood, The "True Scholastic Stink," and the Common Reader
OK, make that two.

[Eric]

IN PRAISE OF THE ONE-TOPIC ESSAY AND THE SHORT NOVEL

An essayistic rendering of thoughts and opinions

I think I'll give the divagations of Smith & Seal a miss. There is too much nit-paring and cheese-picking for me. The Smith quotes and the Seal replies themselves contain a little too much name-dropping, with a litany of the usual suspects. Seal is too busy dashing about, with his umpteen grey quotes in boxes and all those names.

When I read essays, I choose ones that stick to one topic, and don't really want to be overwhelmed with names and titles. I believe that Montaigne and quite a few others managed to write one-subject essays.

Is Zadie Smith really worth all the scholarly counterblasts that Seal summons up? Are these the winds of change or just hot air? The world of put-downs and counter-put-downs is a game played by effete literati and MA students. I want to read an essay about a narrower subject, and rather not have to read essays about essays. It all becomes a bit of a hall of mirrors.

As when reading other bloggers, this reader gets lost in the labyrinthine maze of verbose logorrhoeaic reduplification of repeated written material set down in print, and cannot see where his original question, "why do people write such long novels?" is in any way addressed. I don't care what novels "redeploy" as long as they're well-written. But if they're too fat, maybe they should go on a slimming course.

[nnyhav]

Are book blogs and novellas made for each other?
I guess chatrooms should be confined to short stories, or vice versa.

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by nnyhav

One reaction to Zadie's ruminations:
Blographia Literaria: Zadie Smith's Essay on Essays: Off with the Top of Her Head
Blographia Literaria: "The Books at Hand": James Wood, The "True Scholastic Stink," and the Common Reader
OK, make that two.

oh, wow, he's nice. thanks for sharing.