In Defense of Very Long Novels
By: Xi Chen
Tags: Reading, Books, Essay, Culture, Literally Literary

Photo by Ryan Graybill on Unsplash

This past week I’ve read two, seemingly polar opposite LitHub articles. The first was “In Praise of Difficult Novels” by Will Self, which argues for a return of the High Modernist movement in current literary fiction. The second was “On the Very Contemporary Art of Flash Fiction” by John Dufresne, which explains the opportunities, especially in respect to writing on the Internet, of flash fiction.

I don’t judge a piece of writing based on its length. What’s important is what the author is able to convey to readers within the limitations of their form. This is why flash fiction can be so brilliant, not only for its accessibility and its reflection of the Twitter age as Dufresne points out, but also for great flash fiction’s profound ability to capture a moment in all its strange singularity. Medium has been a good platform for finding flash fiction, and I assure you a quick search will not leave you disappointed.

That being said, I think this standard should apply to all forms of fiction. What I want to argue is that the long novels have been unfairly rejected or made taboo by readers. However, I also want to push back against Will Self’s intellectual-nostalgia conception of complexity in literature. I think the High Modernist writers (e.g. Joyce) made enormous progress in developing the form of long novels, but I think the focus of the discussion should be on which of their techniques were good for readers and communication, rather than what only and sometimes exclusively makes sense for writers like obscure allusions and stream of consciousness writing.

I once heard Junot Díaz argue that one quality that separates short stories from novels is that novels can make a lot more mistakes. That is, a great short story needs to be perfectly clean, whereas readers will look over many of the weaknesses in a novel because readers are generally nicer to novelists they like. It seems then that reader satisfaction follows a fluctuating scale, where they are more judgemental of short stories, less for novels, and then become increasingly impatient as the form gets lengthier.

I’m like this too. I think this impatience stems partially from the fact that we read novels for clear stories or for well thought out, well crafted themes and characters. Like Díaz said, we have a lot of trust in novelists. So, when a book starts stretching past four or five hundred pages, we start to wonder if the novelist really knows what they’re doing, or whether there is actually anything new or worthwhile left to read.

My concern is that this worry causes readers to be wary of long novels in general, and to assume that length necessarily means excess. Although it’s clear that many long novels just need to be edited — Murakami’s 1Q84 and Yanagihara’s A Little Life are fair examples of this, where length takes away from their ideas.

What then is a standard for a great long novel? I think the answer comes from thinking about what makes great pieces of writing in any form. For example, some of what makes great short or flash fiction is its ability to say so much in such little space. Essentially, an act of compression or refinement. I would argue that one central quality of long novels is their ability to create chaos out of order. The extreme example is Finnegan’s Wake, but this is also apparent in novels like War and Peace, Gravity’s Rainbow, and even Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings.

What’s interesting to me is that no one would criticize The Lord of the Rings for being too long. The reason why is that readers recognize that it takes a lot of space to build an entire world, often with a huge cast of characters and subplots. I think the same standard should apply to long pieces of literary fiction, where the author is trying to craft a whole new world to reflect all the complexities of the real world. The fact is, yes short fiction can encapsulate complexity, but can it immerse you in it? Can it make you feel that complexity physically?

An obvious objection to literature’s history of long novels is its very male pretentiousness and hyper-intellectualism. This is completely fair, and I’ve been a contributor to this issue with the pieces I‘ve written on my page. I think it’s really unfortunate that some of the prominent writers that have taken on the challenge of long novels are very pretentious and inaccessible but I don’t agree that that’s the fault of the form. I don’t believe in Will Self’s argument of “long novels are important because the Modernist project was so beautiful because they used X and Y techniques…” Yes, maybe long novels are not for you but maybe it’s just because the long novels that we hype up as amazing #1s are necessary stepping stones full of mistakes that are required to fully actualize the form. (May I suggest Middlemarch?)

Long novels have the potential to hold our entire world, and I hope that this potential is not lost on readers.