Unreasonable Books

On the audacity and magic of very long books

Art by Metaleap Creative

In the past year I’ve written three long profiles about contemporary novelists tackling self-consciously huge projects where the scope and heft of the book is a major component of the book, whether it’s a sprawling geopolitical network of CIA operatives (William T. Vollmann’s 3,400-page A Table for Fortune), an epic about nine characters dealing with supernatural forces and climate change (Mark Z. Danielewski’s 27-volume The Familiar), or the intersection of working-class life, eternity and fourth-dimensional physics (Alan Moore’s 1,200-page Jerusalem). Authors that embark on this sort of thing usually only do so in the middle or late part of their career, after accumulating enough accolades that some publisher is willing to take the risk.

But the resulting novels tend not to do very well.

Vollmann’s book isn’t out yet, but Danielewski’s novel was canceled after five volumes (he’d written and submitted the first 10; volume 5, at least in the UK, sold just over 200 copies), and Moore’s Jerusalem, according to Bookscan, has sold roughly 12,000 copies in 10 years; not terrible, but surprising when compared to his most recent novel, The Great When (only 300 pages), which has sold that many copies in its first year.

Polonius tell Laertes that brevity is the soul of wit. Mark Twain (allegedly) apologized for having written such a long letter by saying he didn’t have time to write a short one. George Saunders said that humor is telling the truth in fewer words than people expect.

But brevity’s also an indicator of mastery – a sparse style, if it’s eloquent and well crafted, has allusive qualities. It gives the feeling of having been edited toward something. There’s a glimmer of intentionality.

Nick Hornby challenged the sanctity of a sparse style in his (ongoing!) column for The Believer, c. 2003, in which he mentions reading David Copperfield for the first time, Charles Dickens’s longest novel, and celebrates how expansive it is, how indulgent, with special emphasis on a scene in which young Copperfield is freezing on a sidewalk, trying to sell his coat to a drunk old man. The scene’s funny, sad, cozy and embracing and fun, is Hornby’s point, even though he can’t imagine a modern novelist getting it into the final draft of their book.

“[T]here’s some stuff about the whole winnowing process that I just don’t get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words … I’m sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty, if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all?”

One argument for brevity is that a book, if it’s short, suggests a more hospitable and potentially more skilled or focused work; something with a clearer message.

But a short book could just as well signal that the writer doesn’t actually have that much to say. That they’ve taken some tepid ideas and stretched them to a marketable size.

One way of testing this theory is to open a book by a celebrity or influencer (especially if it pertains to money). Hold it open on a table at any random page. Then, right beside it, open a novel or a Lincoln biography or something that was written by a writer. Note the difference between line spacing and margin size. The amount of white space. The memoir (or get-rich book) is literally filled with air.

So brevity’s obviously not a foolproof signal of value.

This year the journalist C. M. Kushins published a biography of the crime writer Elmore Leonard.

I love Elmore Leonard’s work. I think Kushins does too.

The bio is well reported. It collects facts and pins them on a clothing line and the reader walks out into the yard with her trench coat collar popped against the wind and she looks at those facts, in a left-to-right sequence, and gleans a narrative. After 400ish pages I had learned the whole sequence of major events in Elmore Leonard’s life. A difficult assembly! Takes talent. The sentences were clear and I was never confused.

But I also quit caring at some point, which was weird because as a thirtysomething retail-worker with an English degree I tend to put writers like Elmore Leonard on pedestals high enough they come with a parachute. By the end of the book I felt I had a real grasp of Leonard’s professional trajectory, which previously I had not, and it was interesting to know that he was a recovered alcoholic, and a half-interested Catholic, and it was fascinating that the author was sharing never-before-seen excerpts from the unfinished memoir of one of America’s great literary stylists – but I didn’t understand him any better as a person or an artist.

If Gay Talese or Martin Amis or Zadie Smith had gotten lunch with Elmore Leonard, then written a 5,000-word profile about the stories he told, and the mannerisms employed while telling them, we’d likely know him better than we do by the end of the biography.

Or at least we’d feel that we did.

The kind of book that’s really got me thinking about this is the thousand-page novel or multivolume history/biography that takes decades to write.

Publishers don’t like to release thousand-page books. More paper, more ink and sturdier binding means these things cost a lot to produce, which means the jacket price goes up, which means that prospective readers will be turned away by the cost (which only compounds the deterrence of its intimidating size).

Literary agents aren’t thrilled about thousand-page novels, either, because it’s hard to turn a profit.

It’s one thing to believe, as an author, that your story is important; it’s another to believe that your story is so good, and every passage so valuable, that it transcends the advice of experts, and the norms of the market, and deserves 30-plus hours of a reader’s time.

It is an objectively foolish thing for a professional author to embark on.

But sometimes they’re right.

A big book implies self-assurance. It tells you, by merit of just sitting there at such a size, I am worth the time it would take you to read three books on three different subjects.

Jonathan Franzen writes that the effect of a great novel is “to bring us into lives not our own, and the longer the book, the greater the chance of immersion.” His contemporary Donna Tartt is one of the most celebrated novelists of her generation, producing only three (large) novels in 30 years, most recently The Goldfinch (771 pages). Tartt has said, “I write the kind of books that I like to read, long books that keep me in the same imaginal space and with the same characters for a long time and that take over a big portion of my inner life, including my dream life.” Another contemporary, Michael Chabon (whose 639-page The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001), said that he hoped, while writing a huge novel of his own, that it would feel, to contemporary (mostly adult) readers, the way big books had felt to him as a kid: inviting, immersive, a different world in which the reader can disappear.

Franzen, Tartt, and Chabon were all brought up in the 1970s and it’s an easy rebuttal to say that the reason they’re so in love with books is that they were raised at a time with less media and fewer distractions – a world more conducive to the immersive reading of long novels. Maybe their brains are just wired differently.

Within the span of a dozen years, each released huge novels, 600-800 pages, that were critically and commercially successful.

Go to Goodreads and check out the reader reviews for each book: Readers describe that slow, immersive experience of the sort their authors hailed.

But what if these books were even longer? If each were freighted with an extra 180 or 230 exceptionally good pages, tipping them into the thousand-page realm, how might their reception have been different? Even with the prizes and the celebrity book club endorsements and film adaptations. As hypnotic and lyrical and propulsive as they currently are, page by page – how many people would be deterred by the size of the house before checking out its rooms?

H. W. Brands is a historian and biographer. He’s been teaching for half a century. Author of 30 books. Two-time Pulitzer finalist.

When I interviewed him about his best-selling biography of Ronald Reagan, I mentioned that what I loved most about his approach to the material was that, on page 30, the man is 30 years old. It moves.

We talked about being disciplined as a historian, how to lock your sights on the exact parameters of your topic, keep your story from digressing; we talked about the task of literary portraiture, too, of capturing the details of a subject’s life and times and the intersection of the two.

That’s when Robert Caro came up – a model practitioner in both of these forms.

In 1974, after nearly a decade of research and travel and interviews, Robert Caro released The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, a kingmaker in New York City public planning. As Caro illustrates, the guy was basically a gangster. One of the most powerful men in NYC for 40 years without getting elected to anything. Moses resisted Caro for years. Told people in his inner and outer circles not to speak with any young reporter who might come around. After three years he relented and granted Caro a few personal interviews. When Caro asked difficult questions, he was shunned once again. When the book was released, Moses insisted it was filled with lies, but could point to none. “It is slightly absurd, but typical of Robert Moses,” Caro told The New York Times in ’74, “to label as ‘without documentation’ a book that has 83 solid pages of single-space small-type notes and that is based on 17 years of research, including 522 separate interviews.”

The weight of the book – the heft of it in your hand, the diligence of its reporting and the scope of what Caro excavates with his research – lends it a prestige beyond its literary qualities. This is the brutally lighted exposure of a viciously private person who’d avoided scrutiny for decades.

The strange magic of The Power Broker, as with Caro’s later projects, is that the book you’re holding in your hands (which is, as the title suggests, not just about one person but about the network of political power in which he operated) not only documents, in lavish detail and beautiful prose, what this fiercely private villain was like, as he displaced people, or betrayed them, or destroyed their reputations … we also realize that the act of reading this account is exactly the sort of comeuppance he would have hated most: to be scrutinized like this, have his legacy taken from him and recast, in brutal light, by this humble-seeming young reporter who chose, out of conscientious dedication, to spend seven years exposing him.

The more we read, the more we want to exact some kind of punishment on Moses.

The more we read, the greater punishment we are exacting on Moses.

Robert Caro, with his editor Bob Gottlieb, cut 300,000 words from The Power Broker’s million-word manuscript – not because they were bad, as Gottlieb was forever at pains to point out (mainly because Caro, at 90, has clearly not made peace with it), but because the final product, at 1,226 pages, was all the sheets that could be bound together in a single volume at the time. “I can make people interested in Robert Moses once,” Gottlieb said, when Caro suggested the book be split into two volumes. “I can’t get them interested twice.”

In the 50 years since its release, Caro has been working almost exclusively on a biography of President Lyndon Johnson. It started as a trilogy in 1982. The first installment is nearly 1,000 pages and covers the first 30-odd years of Johnson’s life. He only lived 64 years.

But then Caro’s research started to creep. Volume 2 covered only seven years. Volume 3, at 1,200 pages, covers a decade. What began as a three-volume work expanded to four. But in the fourth one he became infatuated with Bobby Kennedy as a foil for Lyndon Johnson. So that one becomes almost a dual biography and ends pretty abruptly.

Now, age 90, Caro claims to have written nearly 1,000 pages for the fifth volume.

Brands sees a flaw in Caro’s greatness: “If a student asks me to suggest a book that’ll teach them about Lyndon Johnson,” he told me, “I’m not going to tell them to read Caro’s biography.” It’s too huge. Too granular in its detail.

Indeed, as Caro himself kinda suggests, it’s hardly a “biography” except that this is the closest word we have for it. Volume 3, Master of the Senate, is as much a portrait of Lyndon Johnson as the senate itself; volume 4, Path to Power, is as much a portrait of Lyndon Jonson as vice president as it is a portrait of the vice presidency.

Caro’s work is something in between history and biography; it’s one medium as a vehicle for the other, or it’s both at once. Or some third thing. An artfully neurotic absorption of all material pertaining to this pivotal historical figure, as filtered through the mind of a brilliantly obsessive writer. The literary equivalent of a 12-minute guitar riff.

These books are as much about Caro as anything else.

Another complicating factor in any author’s quest to write a huge book is, coincidentally, the thing that maybe prompts the idea in the first place: the fact that they’re going to die.

Cormac McCarthy was still working on his final novel, The Passenger, 40 years after he started it. He was almost 90 years old. In and out of cancer treatments. Different from the person who’d embarked on that sprawling project in the 1980s when he made little money and worked on his fiction to the exclusion of all else. As his biographer Tracy Daugherty said via email:

“He would often eat at a Luby’s on Mesa Avenue in El Paso. People would approach his table and ask for an autograph. He’d politely decline. Once, a reporter flew all the way from England to speak to him. This guy tracked Cormac to Luby’s. Cormac apologized, said he knew the fellow had come a long way, but an interview was something he just couldn’t do. The reporter flew home.”

Later in life, diminished by illness and needing company as he never had before, this project that’d consumed so much time and effort, piecemeal over the decades, was at risk of never landing.

While profiling McCarthy’s deathbed push to finish the novel, I found that sources close to him resisted any suggestion that The Passenger was incomplete (everything he wanted in the book is there in the book), but all agreed that, had he been in better health, he would have done another couple drafts.

In my reporting on William T. Vollmann’s 3,400-page opus, A Table for Fortune, I was told what Vollmann himself has since confirmed to The Wall Street Journal: His cancer had come back, it was terminal, and he’d seek no further treatment. Hence the writing of the book, as well as its editing, would be conducted against the clock.¹

It’s another reality of writing huge books that they take a long time to read. The long road to publication will therefore be met mostly with silence. Even among critics, since they’re likely taking a flat rate to review the book, and the more hours it takes to read something, the less they’re being paid per hour. So they’ll turn down the gig, or, worse yet, they’ll skim, look for the gist, and review it anyway.

The response will be slow in coming, if it’s sincere; the first one will almost always be suspect. It’s a recipe for letdown.

So if the question we’re asking ourselves is “What’s the punchy, coherent argument for why big books are a decisively good thing,” the answer is that there probably isn’t one – the benefits and drawbacks of a gigantic book that takes you months to read are experiential. They contain multitudes. They ramble, they digress, they negate themselves and make you sad and bring you up high and make you sad again, an emotional yo-yo effect that lasts for months, but at the end of it neither one of those feelings prevails – what you get, instead, is some larger and more rewarding feeling of relation with this thing, or these characters inside it, or the authorial consciousness on the other side of it that kinda mirrors the most meaningful personal relationships we have in life: They’re complicated, they’re long, more meaningful than the sum of their highs and lows.

In the literary tradition – and yes, our current moment is tethered to it – huge books endure as mutual leaps of faith, between writer and reader, toward the same single point of sustained quiet and contact.

The odds of a payoff are often remote, but we keep on doing it, through the generations, like a meditation or prayer, a humble gesture, involving us both but aimed at some larger thing.

1. The author later managed to secure an in-person meeting with William T. Vollman, which resulted in this beautiful piece.