The Book Babes Get to the Long and the Short of It

Hello Margo,

We book critics usually talk about a book's heft in terms of its enduring value. But the press?the New York Times and a couple of other newspapers, at least?have been hung up lately on heft of a different kind. In this age of miserly reading habits, reporters are agog that one of this fall's fiction releases, Hunger's Brides, by Canadian Paul Anderson, is so big and long that it weighs nearly five pounds. Drop it on your toe, and that toe is history, man.Book Babes continue below ?

Well, this is one way to measure literature, I guess. But there's a so-what aspect to the fact that this novel, or any novel, runs to almost 1,400 pages. We all know the old saw about books being judged by their covers. In this case, the focus is also on the packaging, not the contents.

Granted, the publisher of Hunger's Brides, Carroll & Graf, poked good fun at the book's length?and themselves?by passing out buttons at BookExpo that said, "I READ the WHOLE THING." But the real issue, of course, is not how big the book is, but whether the story merits the length. A corollary question is, who's the audience, and at what length can any book go before it loses a big chunk of its potential readers?

Carroll & Graf has high hopes for Hunger's Brides. Buoyed by how well the book did when it was published in Canada (it won a prize in Alberta), the company is giving the book a big media push, not unlike what Little, Brown did for its summer doorstopper, The Historian. Like The Historian, Anderson's book spans time and space and involves unraveling a mystery that's intended to grip you to the end.

But there are doorstoppers and then there are DOORSTOPPERS: At nearly twice the length of The Historian, Anderson's megabook is really two stories, one that tells the amazing life story of 17th-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and another about the contemporary woman researcher who became obsessed with Sor Juana's life.

The Historian is a big, rambling read with a vampire theme?sort of Anne Rice on steroids, with poetic scene-setting thrown in. I could manage. Hunger's Brides is deeply researched and evocatively written. But with all the other things I need to read, I'm afraid its length exhausts my reading appetite.

In the old days, fat books?called triple-deckers, because libraries wanted to stock them in three parts?were the norm. Genre fiction is still chockablock with 'em?think Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear books or Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series or The Lord of the Rings. But the big literary novel, like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, or Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, seems to be the exception that proves the rule. Is the so-called serious reader suffering from attention deficit disorder? Do novels of 1,000 pages or more tend to reflect a lack of writerly discipline?


Excuse me while I look for my back brace, Ellen,

Is the heftiness of Hunger's Brides a cry for attention? I don't know, but it seems to have raised the bar for what can now be considered a doorstopper. When Rebecca Horsfall's Dancing on Thorns, which clocks in at a whopping 786 pages, arrived on my desk the other day, it looked positively puny next to Anderson's behemoth.

But, as you say, gimmicks can only help you so much. Will Hunger's Bride be a, er, colossal success? I sent Hunger's Brides to a reviewer?see, its heftiness got it that far?but he's only 100 pages into it. And I confess I haven't cracked it yet myself.

Every book?of any size?inevitably rises and falls on what's delivered inside. It's tempting to say that books over 1,000 pages had better be good, because they consume such a big chunk of your reading time. Padding is inexcusable. But slim volumes better be good, as well?especially if we're paying good money for them. And what I see are a lot more quick reads?books clocking fewer than 200 pages?are crossing my desk these days.

In fiction, I particularly notice this trend when it comes to foreign authors: Italian writer Erri de Luca's Three Horses, from Other Press, is 124 pages, and in small format besides. Cuban-born Mayra Montero's Captain of the Sleepers, out this month from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is 192 pages. And Uruguayan novelist Carlos María Domínguez's The House of Paper, due out in November from Harcourt, weighs in at a scant 112 pages?and that includes illustrations of Peter Sís.

The long and short of it is this: When I read a long book that feels long, I wish someone would have had enough guts to gut it. But when I read a shorter book that feels slight, I wonder what pressures brought it to market too soon?and think readers deserve more bang for their bucks. Editors, anyone?


Good point, Margo,

It's long been my contention?ever since I worked as an editor myself!?that a good editor is a writer's best friend. Speaking of such, I called two of the best, Gerald Howard, of Random House, and Michael Pietsch, of Little, Brown. Among their many credits, Howard edited David Foster Wallace's first two books; Pietsch took over with Infinite Jest, which, he happily reports, sold more than 100,000 copies.

A frequent complaint among writers is that publishing houses don't edit anymore. But Pietsch and Howard do, bringing their well-honed sensibilities to manuscripts by writers like Wallace just as Maxwell Perkins brought the best out of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. (Ah, the good old days.) It sounds esoteric, but as Howard describes it, he's using a pretty basic barometer when he wears his editor's hat: Am I getting bored here? Is this side trip really necessary?

Howard ridicules the notion that we've become a sound-bite culture, pointing out that even recent blockbuster movies? Star Wars, Lord of the Rings?have long and intricate narrative designs. "These sorts of narratives fulfill an imaginative need that's built into us, to live in a larger world that's both mythic and real," he says. Creating these universes?imaginary or real?requires a verbal amplitude that can't be contained in 300 or 400 pages.

Pietsch, meanwhile, makes the good point that people in the book industry may be the toughest sell for a fat book, because they're so inundated with reading. For that reason, he says, Little, Brown printed the Advance Readers Copies of The Historian on thin paper "so industry folks would not be daunted." The actual book, however, was printed on thicker stock so customers could see they were getting a meaty read. Who woulda thought?