Novel length: is bigger necessarily better?

Cafe Society
1

Not really a rant, just a mild grump… This thread got me thinking about novel lengths. The novel is, in my view, best defined as “a prose fiction of some length”, but the market today (especially the fantasy market) seems increasingly to adopt the definition “a prose fiction of such length that you need both hands just to lift the sucker.” I am inclined to wonder if this is a good thing.

I’m a great believer in the idea that a story should be as long as it needs to be. Stories hacked down by cost-conscious editors or ruthlessly condensed for the Readers’ Digest generally disappoint me… but so do stories inflated to many times their natural length by huge volumes of piffle. But it seems mine is a minority opinion - heck, the sheer length of some books is seized on by the sales people; Mary Gentle’s Ash, for instance, was marketed as “the longest fantasy novel ever written”.* Why is this necessarily a good thing? I mean, I don’t enjoy much success, going up to women in bars and saying “Hi, baby! I weigh twice as much as Brad Pitt!”

“Ah,” you say, “but, Steve, what makes you larger than Brad Pitt is a huge amount of unsightly padding.”

“Fine,” I say. “And this distinguishes me from the average modern fantasy novel… how, exactly?”
*[sub]To be fair, Ash, in my opinion, pretty much justifies its length.[/sub]

2

With the cost of books are high as they are, readers like to think they get a lot for their money.

Big, fat fantasy novels have sold well since Lord of the Rings. There’s every incentive to write long ones.

3

I agree with the OP. One of my favorite reads is “Of Mice and Men”. It is a rather short book and I’m not sure it is even considered a novel but I would pick it over any 1,000 page book anyday.

4

I realize there are people who read simply to be drawn away from reality, and I assume for those people a long novel is preferable.

What I admire is the number of “moments” a novel has. If I can remember dialog or a description from almost every page, it’s very good indeed. By that token, long books like “Gormenghast” and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” rate as highly for me as quite short ones such as “The Thirteen Clocks”, “A Christmas Carol”, and “Winnie the Pooh”.

Now, if those books were as good, but much longer, that would be a good thing.

Equally, there’s a lurking suspicion that many long books, such as “The Lord of the Rings”, “Dune” and “Foundation”, have less-than-exceptional writing on many pages. It’s not necessarily that the less riveting pages should be deleted, but they succeed is due in part to “leaning on” the authority of the better pages.

5

I agree Steve: Not one of Niven’s novels is anywhere near as good as his “Known Space” short stories. Bradbury’s novels run the gamut from mediocre to competent. But his short-stories!

The “doorstopper” book trend is annoying and the current trend for “extruded fantasy product” is driving me nuts. One of the best (sadly, little known) fantasy books is Esbe: A Winter’s Tale by Linda Haldeman. MAYbe 250 pages. Maybe. Yet every damned word is perfect. Compare that to Robert Jordan’s latest treekiller.

A) I want the short-story back
B) I want normal sized novels back
C) I doubt I’ll get either anytime soon.

Fenris

6

Worse yet is a series of really long novels. I am currently reading Tad Williams’ Otherland saga. It’s four volumes of 700+ pages each!

7

I don’t mind length if there’s a point to it. As long as the text is advancing the narrative, that’s fine. Two longish ones that spring to mind are The Stand and Lonesome Dove. Even with The Goblet of Fire, I didn’t mind the length because there was a lot of entertaining action going on.

It’s books that spend a thousand pages littering the landscape with flowery prose who’s only purpose is to demonstrate that the author owns a thesaurus that annoy me. Anne Rice, I’m looking at you. Especially The Witching Hour.

8

But there are always exceptions.

Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun” runs 1200 pages and is fascinating (it was marketed as four separate novels, but Wolfe wrote it as one – the first three all have perfunctory paragraphs saying, basically, “That’s all for now, folk. Tune in next time.”)

A lot of people just love to get lost in a fantasy world. These people buy books in large numbers. The logic is clear.

Still, a short novel can be a joy.

9

Well, yes, long isn’t always bad. Once I’d read Ash, for example, I felt I’d got my money’s worth. But I felt the same way about Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, which, compared to Ash, looks slim enough to shave with.

And I choose The Hellbound Heart for a reason: Clive Barker is an author who, in my opinion, weakens badly when writing at length. Like a lot of people, I was introduced to Barker through the short stories collected in the Books of Blood; short, memorable, punchy stories that made an immediate, strong impression. That impression - in my view, this is just me, I may be peculiar - gets seriously diluted in his later, longer works. So much so, in fact, that I stopped reading his novels entirely after Sacrament … which can hardly be what the marketing bods want, can it? Don’t they want my money as much as the next man’s? (Whines piteously: “I’m a market too, dammit! I’m a market too!”)

10

Once a novel gets too long, it takes a skilled author to pull it off. I’ve often seen that the length is a result of several over-developed parallel subplots, and if they aren’t properly resolved, the reader ends up thinking they could be cut entirely. I’m looking at you, Tom Clancy.

11

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of my favourite works of fiction, and is usually classified as a novel (or novella), even though it’s very, very short. But I think every single word is beautifully judged.

Likewise, Story Of My Life by Jac McInnerny is very short. But I think it counts as a novel, and is for me one of the most consistently laugh-out-loud wittiest books I’ve ever read.

Quite a few posters so far have listed examples of very long novels which are good, and have merit, but which could have used a little judicious editing, to say the least. My own nomination would Foucault’s Pendulum. Lots of friends recommended this to me, thinking it would be right up my street. They were right, it is, and I enjoyed it, but I suspect it could have been about 100 pages lighter and better. There’s some very draggy prose in there.

All aspiring authors should bear in mind Truman Capote’s matchless swipe at Kerouac’s On The Road: “That’s not writing. That’s typing.”

Then again, there are novels like Catch-22. It’s long, and I wouldn’t want it trimmed by a single word.

So, no, bigger doesn’t mean better.

12

I think that I good novel does not need to have a lot of pages. Ayn Rand could have said everything she needed to in half the pages.

I did think that LOTR was great, despite its length.

13

All things being equal I enjoy longer novels because they last longer. If I’m sitting around with a 1000 page tome I know it will take awhile to finish and I’ll pace myself and it might take a week or so. But if the book is only 300 pages I might finish it in an afternoon which usually leaves me feeling a little disappointed.

Not always though. In the both ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and the 2 Amber series I finished one book every afternoon which took about a week to finish and I was satisfied.

So if the quality is good I’d rather have a long book. But I’d rather read a good short one then a long boring one anyday.

14

I think this is the same problem as with films, where film-makers don’t think they’re allowed to make a movie that’s less than two hours long, even if that extra half hour is total filler.

That said, my two favorite books are both very long - James Joyce’s Ulysses and Moby Dick, neither of which deserve to have anything edited in my opinion (I know millions disagree ;)).

On the other hand, my next favorite writing is the very short pieces that Franz Kafka wrote, many of which are only 1 page long, or even shorter.

Obviously, everyone believes in quality over quantity in theory, but in practice, size really does seem to matter for sales and for reputation.

15

I’ll second Khadaji. Ayn Rand’s novels would have benefited from a liberal editing. Atlas Shrugged, really starts beating you over the head with its message by the end. I suppose Rand thought her audience would be as dense as the antagonists in her book.

Otherwise, I agree with Osiris, I think long novels can captivate in a unique way. You become more attached with the world the author creates than you ever could in just a quick jaunt.

16

Some novels make well of the number of words or pages used, some don’t.

I have read most of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, and most of them are in the 200-300 page range. Easy to read, entertaining, and insightful in Vonnegut’s own way. The same goes for Mark Twain, who I think is a precursor to Vonnegut. Neither Vonnegut nor Twain wrote long novels, but both wrote great novels.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 5 novels during his most prolific period are all pretty long, with The Brothers Karamazov being the longest at about 900-1000 pages (depending upon edition, I suppose). I don’t care how long they are; I enjoyed reading them very much. However, of those 5 novels, Crime and Punishment, at a relatively short 500-600 pages (also depending upon edition), was my favorite.

Victor Hugo needed an editor when he wrote Les Miserables. It’s a great novel, but had too many excesses. For instance, he discusses the sewers of Paris for about 25 pages. Due to its relative brevity, I enjoyed The Hunchback of Notre Dame more.

A couple of long novels that I cannot see shortening much are War and Peace and The Count of Monte Cristo. So much is going on in both of those novels that I think any abridgement would take something valuable away.

Regardless of length, a novel should encourage the reader to want to turn the page. This applies to a short novel or a long one. The main thing is whether it should be a long novel or a short one. Often writers will go too far, while others will not go far enough. Quite simply, my point is that it’s not the number of pages, but the quality of those pages.

Chalk me up with those who say that the story should be as long as it needs to be.

By the way, I saw a cheap copy of The Stand (which looks fairly long) by Stephen King at Barnes and Noble the other day. I haven’t read any of his stuff, but the general premise seems interesting and the price is good. Do you think I should cut my teeth on this novel or try something else from King first?

17

I’ll agree with you with this in priciple, but I like the fact he took the time to explain the background about various things. And there was a reason for the sewer description, such as setting up the atmosphere for the chase.

OTOH, however, it’s not that great just because now I get pissed off whenever I see a Les Mes movie just because they always make the sewers too F***ING CLEAN!

If anything, I’d be more upset by the fact many of the characters speak in monolouges rather then dialouge and some of the philosphical rants.

It’s still a great book, though, IMHO.

18

I agree with most of what’s been said about the big fantasy novels. The worst example of page bloat I’ve ever seen was in A Cavern of Black Ice, by J. V. Jones. I finally gave up on this stinker at the 500 page mark, which meant that I was just barely half way through. The author, for some reason, decided to pack the book with an army of minor characters. To make matters worse, she simply couldn’t leave any of them alone. People who should have been dealt with in a couple of pages, or ommitted entirely, instead have there backgrounds explored in excruciating detail. Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World is another good example. Almost nothing of importance happens during the middle section of the book.

In terms of literary novels, though, I think there’s something to be said for length. There are certainly plenty of good short works, but to be a true masterpiece, a novel needs some time to draw you into its world. A good pair of novels to illustrate this point is Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. Both of them have excellent writing, but Grapes has a much bigger emtional impact.

19

I have given up on reading Tom Clancy and Steven King’s newer books because they’re too long. There are very few stories that really deserve as many words as War And Peace has, and King’s and Clancy’s aren’t among them. Their earlier works are shorter and much more enjoyable.

20

I don’t have my Kundera collection with me where I’m currently living, but I think I recall a book that he wrote (not a novel, but a book about writing novels), which posited that there was a kind of limit on how much information the mind could reasonably manage at one time, and that limit was one or two hundred pages. (I may be way off on this; I read the book years ago.) That may be why all of his novels are relatively short, as novels go. Then again, he has been known to praise Proust, who wrote one of the longest novels in history, as far as I know.

Anyway, some of my favorite books are Mutiny on the Bounty, Moby Dick, and Tolkien’s trilogy, and they are all quite long. I tend to avoid books that are intimidatingly thick, but these three I have read more than once, and found them to be worthwhile. On those rare occasions when I read a really long book and love it, I always feel a little sad to see it ending. A truly great book might be ten thousand pages long, and still end too soon–but these are rare. Most 300-page books could easily be reduced to thirty without any real loss.