Under the Covers: Sometimes, bigger isn’t actually better

Your dear scribe spent a hell of a lot of time reading over winter break.

I was channeling my inner Juan Garcia Madero, one protagonist of many in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. Madero’s known for such lines as “Discipline: reading every morning and writing in the afternoons and reading like a fiend at night.”

It’s inspirational stuff.

Beyond the relatable details, what sticks out the most about Bolaño’s novel is its length—it’s a 648-page titan. The reader quickly gets sucked into its world, filled with the romance of rebellious Mexican poetic movements and glamorous literary bums, but there’s something to be said for brevity.

It is difficult to keep track of the interlocking character paths; every few pages a new name to remember emerges.

Holding on to all of the details—questions arise like which failed poet slept with which other failed poet, when did such-and-such thug get serious about writing and stop smoking weed all the time—required contortions from my brain that brought back unhappy memories of finals week.

I couldn’t help but think that the book would be better off had an editor chopped, say, 30 percent of its length and insisted on dropping a few characters. I adored The Savage Detectives, but it didn’t earn its length.

Toting around fat tomes is seen as sign of intelligence (see the numerous Etsy listings for “I Like Big Books and I Cannot Lie” canvas bags and coffee mugs). Goodreads has many listings for book clubs based around lengthy novels, but there are none out there for fans of shorter ones.

It certainly seems like recent “important” American novels that aspire to greatness usually drop 500-plus pages down in front of readers—David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, and Don DeLillo’s Underworld being the most egregious. The Man Booker Prize winner of 2013, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, is 848 pages long.

Doesn’t the literary establishment know that we’ve got other things going on in our lives?

At least DeLillo’s been listening to us lovers of the short reads. Since 1997’s 832-page Underworld, he’s stuck to writing works that look like novellas in comparison. His latest, Point Omega, is only 117 pages. “If a longer novel announces itself, I’ll write it,” he said in a 2010 interview.

That’s the spirit.

Longer novels can aggravate. They expose the reader to a writer’s particular quirks for an extended period of time. The latter half of Great Expectations was sullied because I knew that the future would hold more run-on sentences and convenient coincidences than I could handle.

My sister memorably discarded Infinite Jest two-thirds through with a tweet—“There’s only so many times you can read about a guy’s pot dealer being late.”

The shorter the book, the smaller the chance there is that something about it will rub me the wrong way. And that means wonderful short books get closer to that ideal of “perfection” than longer ones.

Take for instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. These novels wouldn’t evoke the same powerful, singular emotions if they were longer. Their short length ties the reader indelibly to the certain moment in time in which they read them.

I read The Bell Jar over two days of intense joy in my life, and the dichotomy between my happiness and the depression that Esther Greenwood experienced seared my impressions of the novel into my mind.

If it was a slogging read that dragged over several weeks, I doubt it would have left such an imprint. I love it when a writer makes an impression on me with a book that I finish over the course of an afternoon. It’s a sign of confidence—they know what they’re saying is powerful, and they don’t need to beat me over the head with it.

For readers, shorter books mean that they get to move onto the next one as soon as possible and experience more styles and stories within the same period of time.

Maybe that’s a little mechanistic, but hey, I’m all for efficiency.