In Defense of Very Long Novels

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…

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