Does Size Matter?

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Guest Post by Dell Smith

McSweeney's just published The Instructions, a novel by Adam Levin. It's about four days in the life of ten-year-old Gurion Maccabee while he fosters a revolution against his Junior High. The Instructions has garnered comparisons to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest in its ambition, spirit, and length. Here's Publishers Weekly: "Between the hubris it takes to expect readers to digest more than 1,000 pages about a tween who says 'the likelihood that I was seemed to me to be increasing by the second' and the shoving in of e-mails, diagrams, and transcripts of television footage, the idea that this could be a great novel is overshadowed by the fact that this is a great big novel, shaggy and undisciplined, but with moments of brilliance." The Instructions clocks in at 1030 pages. The review implies its length is both its outstanding feature and its weakness.

Big books have always intrigued me. In school I was a slow reader. I'd spend weeks reading a 150-page school-assigned book. In high school I realized that carrying the same slender paperback around for weeks was not the way to a girl's heart. Stephen King showed me the way when I discovered The Stand in my school library. I was intrigued by the cover illustration: two figures fighting in a barren landscape—evil against good. The size of it, 823 pages (expanded later by 400 pages), only added to its mystique.

Turns out my bodacious blonde lab partner, Lisa, had read The Stand and loved it. After I finally finished it, I took out other big books and brought them to class, a new one each week. I made cursory stabs at reading them, but generally they were for show. Still, the seeds were sown: I liked my books big. And so, in my mind, did the ladies.

So, what makes a book big? For the sake of this post, I've determined that a book over 600 pages in length is big. Big books have been written and read for centuries, starting with the Bible, whose various editions start at around 1300 pages. Don Quixote clocks in at 1120. Most editions of Moby Dick are over 600 pages. Same with Joyce's Ulysses.

Certain themes lend themselves to the big book. Take war. Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson: 624 pages; The Naked and the Dead by, Mailer: 721; Gravity's Rainbow, by Pynchon: 784; War and Peace, by Tolstoy: 1424 pages. The scope of war and vast characters and locations all beg for the longer format.

Social journalism is another area that apparently needs many, many pages to make its point. John Dos Passos' massive U.S.A. is really a collection of three novels totaling 1312 pages. James T Farrell's character and social study trilogy,Studs Lonigan, is 1024 pages. William T. Vollmann's Imperial, which tops off at 1344 pages, dissects a single southwest border county, and has been called "an intensely personal fever dream of an encyclopedia that makes a strange, northern companion to last year's giant borderlands masterpiece, Roberto Bolaño's 2666."

Vollmann (who seems to produce a big book annually) also published Rising Up, and Rising Down, comprised of 7 volumes that are "an extended inquiry into our motivations for and justification of violence." At 3298 pages, this book elicits dreams of grandeur in the big book reader. I long to own this book. I would put it on my sturdiest shelf, dust it each week, and constantly flip through the pages. But I would probably never read it. I only long to have read it.

So, while big books are fun to own, are they worth reading? I couldn't get throughStephen Dixon's Ulysses-like novel, Frog, which, at 784 pages was a mountain of alternative versions, time shifts, and fake starts that I never warmed to. I've been wending my way through Bolaño's 2666 for over a year, although my slack pace is due in part to the difficulty of the theme (Mexico's rampant murder rate) and knowing it was his last book and wanting it to last.

Perhaps most upsetting of all is my failure to read Infinite Jest (1104 pages). I bought it when it was first published in 1996—yes, I was with a girl, although I don't think she was impressed. I immediately became bogged down keeping up with the endnotes. The narrative structure overwhelmed me and I had to stop. Which is a shame because DFW was my generation (almost, he was older by a few years, but I'll take what I can get). He should have been talking right to me through his clotted pages and future-looking structure. Someday I'll try again.

Mostly men write big books, but there are female writers who blossomed in the longer format. Take  with The Fountainhead at 720 pages and Atlas Shrugged clocking in at 1200. Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind is over 1000 pages. Joyce Carol Oates tends to run long, usually well over 400 pages and occasionally straying above 600 (The Gravedigger's Daughter, 624, Blonde, 752). Some of JK Rowling's Harry Potters are over 600 pages. Every book in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series (7 and counting) clock in at over 600 pages, with The Fiery Cross the page champion at 1472. Stephenie Meyer makes the list easily with Breaking Dawn at 756 and Eclipse at 640. New Moon squeaks over at 608. Taken in a lump as the Twilight Saga, the four Twilight books total up to 2560 pages.

So, finally I ask: are bigger books inherently better? No, bigger doesn't always mean better. And sometimes, bigger means not as good. Big books are more likely to suffer from structure problems, an over abundance of characters, and indulgences of folly that only a big book allows.

But there are just as many big books that reward readers with an experience that cannot be duplicated in a shorter book. Big books offer character richness with potential casts of hundreds. Big books give writers an expansive palette that can encompass the horizontal, linear tapestry of an entire war, the beginnings of man, or the complete history of a real or imagined place.

Alternately, big books incorporate the vertical, time-shift depth of a day (or four) in the life of a single character. For writers, composing a big book signals the freedom to keep every word that flits from brain to fingertips to page 1156, line 36, and column 12. Big book readers get to join a small but privileged club of readers who can say with pride: "I slogged all the way through to the end. I win!" Don't forget to yell this near your wife/husband/lover.

What are your favorite big books? Is there a big book you've always wanted to read, but never had the time or stamina? Or a big book you started but never finished?

(originally published in Beyond The Margins)

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Dell Smith is a fiction writer. He grew up on Cape Cod and left town to study filmmaking. He writes stories and novels, and works as a technical writer at a software company northwest of Boston. He has also worked as a videotape editor, cook, music video lackey, TelePrompTer operator, accounts receivable clerk, assistant film editor, caterer, roadie, flea market vendor, videotape duplicator, and wedding videographer. He has lived in Worcester, Bridgeport, Van Nuys, Billerica, Ithaca, Florham Park, Fairfield, and Simi Valley. He brings his life experience to bear in his fiction. His writing has appeared in Fiction, J. Journal, and Grub Street's 10th anniversary anthology Hacks. He is a regular contributor to The Review Review and maintains a blog, Unreliable Narrator at dellsmith.com, featuring essays on movies, writing, and the publishing biz, along with book reviews and author interviews. He is currently writing a novel. But who isn't?