Say No to Fat (Fat Books, That Is)

[Liam]

Why modern novelists need to watch their weight

Some great books have no more than 200 pages, so why do we now think that big is best? Robert McCrum asks...

In these lean times, fiction is putting on weight. Take three of the major novels out in the next few weeks. Never mind the quality, which is variable, feel the width.

Angelmaker (Heinemann), Nick Harkaway's second novel, weighs in at 576 pages. My copy of Capital (Faber) by John Lanchester tips the scales at 577pp. The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood (S&S) is a 420-page debut. Even the Costa winner, Andrew Miller's Pure (Sceptre), runs to a chunky 352 pages. When last year's Booker winner, The Sense of an Ending, was first shortlisted, there were some who said that, at 150 pages, it wasn't really a novel. Whatever happened to the slim volume?

You can blame the computer for the contemporary writer's reluctance to cut. Again, you can blame the decline of editing at the big imprints, which is actually more apparent than real. Or you can point the finger at the pressures of the marketplace, especially in America.

The jury is out on all these charges. Fatter novels are the outcome of these and many other factors. What's hardly in doubt is that where novelists used ascetically to follow a regime of "less is more", now they're piling on the carbs.

This trend towards fiction of between 350 and 500-plus pages is new. Graham Greene, whose prose was always pared to the bone, wrote of learning his craft as a subeditor on the Times: "A sprawling style is unlikely to emerge from such an apprenticeship." For much of the 20th century, novels averaged 75,000 to 80,000 words, making a book of fewer than 250 pages and sometimes barely 200. Further back, the picture becomes more complex.

While we can doff our caps to Thackeray, Trollope and the triple-decker Victorians, we should recognise that some of English literature's best-loved classics are exceedingly short. The recent celebration of Dickens's 200th birthday has given a new lease of life to Nicholas Nickleby and Bleak House, which are 800pp and more than 1,000pp, respectively. But the Dickens story everyone loves is A Christmas Carol, which is 160 pages, even with illustrations.

In the minds of many readers, Henry James is associated with orotund monsters such as The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. Actually, the master's masterpiece, to which generations of readers are drawn like iron filings, is The Turn of the Screw, which is just 128 pages short.

James's brilliant near-contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson, defied the gravity of the age with a sequence of short classics, notably Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island. Stevenson used to say that "the only art is to omit". Tell that to Messrs Harkaway, Miller and Wood.

The more you look for brevity, the more you find it flourishing in the shadow of fiction's spreading oaks. Herman Melville is now celebrated for that archetypal long novel, the baggy Moby-Dick, his American masterpiece. But Melville is also the author of Bartleby the Scrivener, well under 100 pages, an existential thriller.

Possibly the greatest short novel ever written, the haunting, hypnotic pages of Conrad's Heart of Darkness are as rich, strange and savage as anything since. Conrad wrote it in a just over a month in December/January 1898-9. It's about 38,000 words. EM Forster, another Edwardian, nailed the vanity of discursive novels with this note in his Commonplace Book. "Long books," he wrote, "are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time."

Short books, in brief, form a vigorous alternative tradition. This is a line of fiction that runs deep into the last century and illuminates the reputations of many great writers. Animal Farm is short, and so is Beckett's incomparable Ill Seen Ill Said and Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Across the Atlantic, the source today of so many long novels, Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany's) and Philip Roth (Goodbye, Columbus) never wrote better than when they wrote short. The greatest American fiction of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby, is about 58,000 words, or 192 pages in my Penguin classics edition.

So, when book clubs in the depth of winter complain, after the humorist Ambrose Bierce, that "the covers of this book are too far apart" they should look out for something short. It's not fashionable, but it might educate and entertain.

[Eric]

I agree entirely with Robert McCrum on this one. The Peirene Press in the UK prides itself on producing short works of fiction. One of their latest is a novel translated from the Finnish by the mother & daughter team whose surnames are Jeremiah. The author Asko Sahlberg who writes in Finnish and lives in Sweden.

And there are lots of other contemporary authors, throughout Europe, such as Magdalena Tulli, Leena Krohn, Amélie Nothomb, and probably hundreds of other contemporary authors that could so easily be translated into English, were there the will and skill do do so.

There is nothing wrong with long novels, as long as they are well-structured. But you get the feel nowadays that some authors are manic, garrulous, and do not know when to stop. They tie up no ends, just keep rambling. I have not read the Norwegian author Knausgård, but I strongly suspect he is a culprit, as are several young American authors, usually male and cocky, who appear incapable of paring down and assume that every word transferred from their brain to their hard disk is holy.

[Heteronym]

You can blame the computer for the contemporary writer's reluctance to cut. Again, you can blame the decline of editing at the big imprints, which is actually more apparent than real. Or you can point the finger at the pressures of the marketplace, especially in America.

Rabelais, Cervantes, Diderot, Sterne, Fielding, Richardson, Balzac, Zola, Eça, James, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Trollope, Thackeray, Dickens, Joyce, etcetera just suffered from bad editing.

This article is so fucking inane I don't know where to start.

Mr. McCrum discovered that some writers write long novels, and some writers write short novels, and some even dare to write both types. It's good to know his college education was of some use to hone those acute analytical powers of his. In a future article, Mr. McCrum will explain how novels are actually written with words...

[Liam]

He's talking about MODERN (i.e. living) novelists, genius, not Tolstoy or Eliot. The operative word in the title of the piece being, gasp, "modern."

And he's talking about the "fashion" for long fat books that induces some writers to write these long fat books, and that's what he means by writers needing to watch their weight. Read the piece a little more carefully next time--

[Heteronym]

I have read the article carefully, and McCrum does not provide any evidence of a fad or any compelling reasons as to why modern long novels are problematic. There have always been long novels. The classics are the best defense of the contemporaries because there's no motive to deprieve them of what their ancestors had the freedom to do. Writing is a free activity, anyone who wants to indulge in thousand-page-long novels should do so; that goes for writers and readers. McCrum needs not complain: there are many novels still coming out with his approved lenght of 150-300 pages. It seems he's just sore that the writers he wants to read aren't giving him what he wants. Well, they owe him nothing.

[Eric]

McCrum may well be grandstanding, because he happens to be in a position of power where he can throw out opinions whenever he likes.

I think the argument against fat books is not whether or not people wrote such things in the 19th century (remember that Dickens wrote in instalments to get paid, so his books were bound to become fat), but whether every novel that is superhyped nowadays need be 500 pages plus.

I worry that many authors just don't know when to stop, or have been paid a huge advance by the publishing house. There is no proof one way or the other which should exclude long or short novels. But the author must keep the story going and not just tack on chapters. Surely, people like George Eliot and Dostoevsky, who were not just writing long books for money as far as I know, wrote novels with a complex story line and tended to tie up the loose ends by the end of the book. Do contemporary authors write a plot with many windings, or do they write numerous episodes, almost short-stories following short-stories? I'm loath to start reading any huge modern novel for fear of having been conned by the marketing people into thinking it's a great novel, but which I will abandon at page 150 or so. I like short novels, where the writer knows where to stop when they have still got the readership with them.

I often disagree with McCrum. As I've suggested, he's in a position to pontificate, at one of Britain's leading dalies. But the 150-300-word boundaries suit me fine (although the last thing I translated was in fact 350-pages long).

[Threetrees]

Brevity is the principal assistant to talent. Thoughts can not be squeezed but they stream to fill the reservoir. One must have a skill not to overdo with it or dilute.

(Instead of introduction of myself)

[pigeonweather]

It could be that readers in these times often conflate size with value. They want to get their money's worth, and tend to super-size everything, given the opportunity. Of course, that's from an American point of view!

[Aldawen]

I think, most of us would agree that a novel can't be classified as good or bad just based on its length. But I have to admit that many (but not all) modern 500+ novels don't carry me over their length. I often miss a convincing and stringent storyline, and I finish these books with the impression that it would have been a good idea to cut them down by hundred or even several hundreds of pages. This always reminds of the quote (attributed to nearly everyone from Goethe to Pascal and from Voltaire to Mark Twain): "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." This covers the "problem" well enough: to keep a novel short without losing the depth and richness of the story is far more work for the author than writing a long novel, but might result in more elegant prose as an extra and I really appreciate if this effort is undertaken.

[Threetrees]

Fat Books or large format ones? ) Interesting video:

Interior text layout for large format books breaks all of the "rules" used in smaller trade and mass market formats.

[Remora]

Ironically, I think a plethora of artistically dubious fat books is a good sign for civilization. It means that subsistence is no longer an issue for a vast number of people who might otherwise be struggling tooth and nail for their daily bread.

You may argue that culture may suffer as a result, but I would argue that the ratio of genius to normal folks will always be more or less the same. The fact that there are many artistically poor fat books circulating has no bearing on the one or two fat books of genius that are bound to be written now and then.

[pigeonweather]

a plethora of artistically dubious fat books is a good sign for civilization. It means that subsistence is no longer an issue for a vast number of people who might otherwise be struggling tooth and nail for their daily bread

Wouldn't it be fun to chart the statistical correlation throughout history of GDP versus words-per-story? I think it would bear out your intuition!

[Eric]

Remora makes a sound point in #11: if you have enough money to live on, you can spend your time on book projects. But the existence of the virtually total free-for-all on the internet and the emergence of blogs does not mean that editing and publisher's choice is outdated. Those publishers and reviewers that are discerning, and include quality in their work plan, are still desperately needed in the world of books, so that we people who haven't all the time in the world to plough through everything published can get some guidance. But if publishers and reviewers are mere lackeys to profit for multinational book factories, then the lowest common denominator will win out.

If, as Tom Lichtenberg says, readers equate size with value, they must be a bit thick. There are many beautiful things written in concise novels, although there is now a danger that publishers will use the 150-page genre to include any amount of junk, and obviously you can charge more for a total of 750 pages if these pages are enclosed in five sets of hardback covers rather than one set of paperback ones. So there is a danger that the artistically dubious thin book will now emerge.

[pigeonweather]

Movies have also gotten longer, it seems. The Hunger Games, for example, is nearly two and a half hours! It takes that much time to include the obligatory quantity of action and emotion, and the same might be said of popular books as well. The George R.R. Martin sagas are very long, and are turned into interminable television series as well. Not only are entertainments growing more obese over time, they are also stuffed full of special effects, like epic pinatas. I'm sure I'm carrying the 'super-size' theme too far, but it's my sense that audience expectations are driving the bulk of the tendency towards more, and more, and more (for your money)

[Rumpelstilzchen]

Such kind of subjective views and observations might be a nice basis for chit-chat or the feuilleton section of newspapers but do they have anything to do with reality? To assess something like this analyzing the hard statistics is unavoidable. Anybody knows any quantitative studies on the evolution of the length of novels or movies over the last centuries/decades? I for myself highly doubt the factual and objective content of such observations as made repeatedly above.

I have read many great short novels as well as long ones over the last few years, long novels where I do not see any compelling reason to cut away anything. From what I have read/seen, both movies and books, I cannot really see any clear trend into the short or the long direction.

Certainly there are writers who are not up to the task of writing long books (of course, there are also writers who should better find a different job...)...

[Rumpelstilzchen]

One more thing, I guess that modern technology with computers, spell checkers, the internet and stuff makes it easier to speed up the production process of mass market books (come to think of it, I guess the general obstacles for publishing are lowered for the average person) such that there might be a trend to longer works, dunno (I would still inist on getting some statistics on this). Or take electronic books for example, no real need to cut anything from books for economic or other reasons, right? On the contrary, if fat books are in fashion, people might even prefer them, hey it is long, so it must be important (one of the main indicators for books getting the opus magnum tag is the length right? it is sad, but that's the way it seems to work quite often in reviews). But I would be very surprised if such a trend is visible for high quality literature for example. Take your favorite literature prize, check the books of the winners, and see if they have been getting longer in the last decades... I doubt it.

[Hamlet]

I can't say no to fat books

Here's why:-

They look good on my bookshelf.

How would you reach up to certain cupboards?

I enjoy them, it's art, not a statistic.

They keep out the wind in winter.

If it's not art, and only a statistic, I'll cast them aside.

Baggy Monsters was Henry James' epithet, I don't warm to James.

Many short novels are just as hard going but for different reasons.

"Underworld" by DeLillo is a big book, but for a single reason.

Platitudes and writing don't fit together very well.

If you place three side by side and two on top, you can reach the cupboard above the cupboard I mentioned earlier.

[Rumpelstilzchen]

I can't say no to fat books

Here's why:-

They look good on my bookshelf.

It is nice to see that you are not as gloomy and melancholic as your namesake

Btw, I am a fan of thin paper, which is unfortunately not really used in English publications (apart from certain religious books). Because with this it does not matter if the book has many pages or not, it is not taking much space on my shelf in any case. I love that some German publishers are using this kind of paper for classics with many pages (Hanser for example), because if you really want to read those books it is much easier carrying thin paper books around or holding them in your hands, say because Anna Karenina has basically the thickness of a normal 300p book. And I think such books are much more elegantly and sophisticatedly looking on my shelf than the average bulky and fat SF pulp hardcover.

[Threetrees]

Hamlet, you've made the day.* Now the task is how many volumes of "Hamlet" do you need to reach for the upper shelf? )

Original printing of Hamlet (the first and the last page)
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