And when there are so many thousands of books to enjoy, it seems inefficient to read a single volume of 200,000 words if there’s any risk that it won’t be a work of staggering genius ... when the time could be equally spent enjoying a diversity of works from several different writers.So Edelstein is telling us we must stick to the task at hand. It’s not about the journey, but the destination. And she who has read the most books before she dies wins? Never mind the joys of lingering over the perfect prose of a wonderful writer; there are stacks of books to be gotten through, people. We must stay on target, we must keep on track.
And that's a reading culture that has cultivated the short, snappy writing of our best contemporary prose stylists--and, indeed, of the efforts of our best editors, the ones [who] recognise the difference between brilliant lyrical prose and fatuous overwriting. Consider the Booker prize winners of the last few years. ... Thanks to these models of modern literature, I now find it difficult to read a novel that is much longer without feeling impatient, without fighting the urge to whip out my red pen and start crossing out the extraneous bit because the editor didn't, because the author was too proud ... to accept that quantity is not the same as quality.It seems to me that these are the words of someone who has read only childishly and without depth.
Reading for pleasure is not a race. The person who gets to the end of the book first does not win. You are not a more successful reader for having made your way through more books.
Further, the length of a book has nothing at all to do with its quality. I’ve read 1,000-page books that weren’t long enough and books of barely 100 pages that were much, much too long. A story should take as long as it needs: not one page more or less. And, yes: publishing fashion will determine some of that. We’re in a shorter cycle now; a few years ago every other book I saw was a toe-breaker. Those cycles will come and go again. But to equate length with poor editing or slack author judgment is just ... well, it’s silly. Should Melville have reduced his thoughts on the whiteness of whales to tweet length? Should Rand have had her Atlas merely grimace, not shrug? Should Tolstoy have edited out all the War and just kept the Peace?
If Edelstein is feeling impatient when reading books she feels are too long, she should either choose her reading material with greater care or cut down on her sugar intake. Perhaps both. But certainly anyone who can talk about “the difference between brilliant lyrical prose and fatuous overwriting” with a straight face, should not also be talking about her urge to whip out her own red pen.
QUESTION TO READERS: What is your favorite long crime novel? Maybe Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone? Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games? Max Allan Collins’ Stolen Away? Something else? Voice your opinions in the Comments section below.
12 comments:
A Place of Execution was fairly long (nearly 500 pages in paperback), but it could have been longer and I would have read on.
Not really crime but I just read The Matarese Circle - Robert Ludlum (536 pages) and enjoyed it
LA Confidential is 496 pages and was a terrific read. It is long compared to the old Gold Medals and such that i normally read which average 150 pages, yet i inhaled it. What a compelling story.
Nelson DeMille's Night Fall is 486 pages, and it is not one page longer or shorter than it should be.
I don't buy Edelstein's argument. Iain Pears's _An Instance of the Fingerpost_ is 752 pp., and look at how wildly successful that was. Sure, we've all read works that feel padded, but we've also read works where we have closed them with a sigh, because we regret that that particular literary journey has ended.
The Crossroads by Niccolo Ammaniti at 496 pages and Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada 596 pages both brilliantly long books that could not have been shorter.
I'm not sure she's aware Sayles is a film director by trade, though he was a writer first.Union Dues was a fine novel, but his last, Los Gusanos, about 15 years ago, was written partly in Spanish, and though pretty well reviewed, didn't sell.
Otherwise, the argument is fatuous. Maybe if she blogged less and read more it would make more sense.
Read the comments for a laugh too. They blame Americans for writing long novels. Ho hum.
This isn't entirely germane to the conversation I suppose, but publishers seem to think that length = quality. Many mystery books look almost like large-print when compared to the more modest font size of most so-called literary fiction. Why, at this point, must a Harlan Coben bestseller weigh in at 400-plus pages, when the amount of words used could easily fit on 300 pages?
I will freely admit to being a little intimidated by longer books. I am a child of the TV generation (hell, I work in the TV biz) I'm a film/TV editor so my whole mindset is one of trimming out the extraneous bits. But just because people have become more impatient is no argument against writers still putting out both long and short books. The biggest flaw in her argument to me is the overwhelming success of the Harry Potter and Twilight series. Those are some hefty books and nothing in recent memory has sold better. I think crime fiction has always tended towards brevity. Mysteries are supposed to make a reader anxious to discover the solution and to a certain extent genres like courtroom procedurals are a foregone conclusion. That's why Perry Mason did well on TV when all was wrapped up neatly in a hour and Mason won the case just like we knew he would from the start.
So while I have never read Infinite Jest myself I don't think the epic novel is going to go away. Nor should it.
Jo Nesbo's books are in the 400-500 page range, but they don't feel any longer than the usual crime fiction fare. They're very good, and they move pretty smartly along.
On the other hand, an awful lot of thrillers seem to be padded with stuff that adds nothing. I'm surprised this critic thinks books are too short. So many of them seem bloated to me.
And good heavens, Harry Potter books are massive tomes.
I read at slightly idiotic speeds, so to be perfectly honest, I've rarely met a book that I wouldn't have preferred to be several hundred pages longer. It's particularly grating when I've ordered something online from overseas, paid what is for a student a fair amount of money, and then finished the thing in under two hours. (There's a reason The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favourites, and that I recently took Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities as holiday reading, despite it weighing several kilos in paperback.) Give me diversions, excessive backstory, musings on the carbon footprint of the detective's dinner, the specs of the reporter's mobile phone - the more the better. My own thought processes are pretty rambling, and quite apart from the reading speed/value per page issue, I rather enjoy finding that reflected in print. As a result, my standards for shorter books are (distinctly unfairly) much higher than for longer ones.
Mind you, I'm not quite far gone enough to suggest that there's an excuse for poor editing. On the other hand, some stories and styles simply require more space, and I resent the idea that good storytelling has to be a sprint rather than a marathon. Using, say, Stieg Larsson as an example, while I'm sure the books would have been edited down had he lived, excessive length and detail worked in the 19th century as a style choice (and yes, I know certain authors were paid by the word/installment, but we still read them now), and I don't see why modern conventions and supposed attention spans should render this extinct.
However, I also have the visual imagination of a sack of wet cement, so I find it very hard to "see" characters, scenes etc unless the author has described them in depth (or if I'm familiar with the setting.) Thus I enjoy what others more visual could justifiably describe as bloat.
I have to agree with John, as an aside - I hate overly large fonts used to create artificial length. Much too much page-turning, inconvenient to haul around, and never quite large enough to qualify as actual large-print and broaden access (which would justify the practice, I think.)
Hmmm. It appears I practice what I preach, at least when it comes to the length of blog comments.
I just heard from an excellent British author whose books are at the 200-250 pages length that there are publishers who don't want editors to edit the books, since they'd get shorter and that's what they don't want, because they want every book to be long. (I think he was talking about an American publisher.) So there's a bit of truth behind what Edelstein says.
As for the long crime novels: THE LONG GOODBYE, Ellroy's LA Quartet and American Tabloid (haven't as yet read the others). Does Jonathan Littell's THE KINDLY ONES count as a crime novel? It's really not a war novel.
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