November 13th, 2009 / 12:51 am
Massive People
The Appalling Volume of Artifacts
WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?
CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.
-from a rare interview with Cormac McCarthy
Tags: cormac mccarthy, interview
William Vollmann’s 1344 page Imperial is #18,477 in books on Amazon right now, at $55 in hardcover.
Next year a likely nearly 1000 page book by a deceased genius will be a bestseller.
McCarthy doesn’t use email.
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November 13th, 2009 / 1:28 amKen Baumann—
#18,477 in bought, but how many read?
devil’s A :)
and I don’t agree with McCarthy here, but it’s the most provocative thing I could pull from it to fit here. got to get some fire!
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November 13th, 2009 / 1:30 amBlake Butler—
no its interesting. but i wouldnt call my man on top of shit.
of course, the long novel is always a challenge for attention, in any era. maybe more so now even. but not being read? that’s just not correct.
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November 13th, 2009 / 1:31 amKen Baumann—
keep in mind the gibson straight consumed before interview even started
November 13th, 2009 / 1:35 amreynard—
i haven’t read it but i’m a little skeptical of imperial. i went to a reading in berkeley and have to say i was not impressed. although he did do a sweet drawing in my battered copy of ice-shirt and joked about sleeping with prostitutes in front of his wife. i don’t see why it’s necessary to write so many goddamn pages. telephone books are for tearing in half to prove you’re the world’s strongest man. if i need a number, i google that shit.
have you read imperial, blake?
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November 13th, 2009 / 1:53 amBlake Butler—
i havent yet. i’ve read a few of his long freakshows though, and have always been hit hard by them. i’m a hard sell on history books but still compelled by imperial. it’ll probably be a bit before i get to it tho.
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November 13th, 2009 / 5:15 amChris—
I started Imperial the other day, but stopped after about 40 pages – not sure if for just a while or forever. I have been fairly obsessed with Vollmann for some time, but I gotta say i’m skeptical too. 1200 pages of narrative is one thing, but 1200 pages of stuff cobbled together over a very long time and without much editing (which is the feeling i get w/ this)… something else.
Except epic fantasies continue to be nearly 1000 pages. The only limit for the final book of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series has nothing to do with what the reader will stomach, but literally how big a single volume mass market paperback book can be and still exist in our universe.
In short, he probably should have replaced “mystery” with “genre” and mentioned that “indulgent” means “masturbatory prose.”
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November 13th, 2009 / 1:28 amalec niedenthal—
are either the brothers k or moby dick masturbatory prosewise?
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November 13th, 2009 / 6:33 amcmr—
moby dick causes a post-masturbatory feeling in my brain… and puts me to sleep.
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November 13th, 2009 / 10:35 pmBen White—
Given how many pages Melville devoted to descriptions of a certain species of sea-faring mammal, yes.
And did you really use Moby Dick as your counter-masturbatory example?
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also:
WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?
CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
um… okay?
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November 13th, 2009 / 1:39 amKen Baumann—
guessing that was said in half-jest, as all jokes
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yeah, there’s no way that’s even close to being true.
if we’re talking strictly page length, two of the more popular fiction books of the past decade were in the range of 700 pages: ‘the corrections’ by franzen and ‘kavalier and clay’ by chabon.
not to mention how many people picked up and read ‘infinite jest’ this past summer due to the book club thing.
i mean, i love mccarthy, but it sounds like he’s sort of relegated himself to the idea that he no longer has to write a massive tome because people ‘don’t read them anymore.’ also, i have a feeling he’s never heard of ‘infinite jest’ and that if he did his brain might explode.
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McCarthy — though a brilliant writer for whom I have affection — seems to me a man whose universe is small, although this is generally true of fiction writers and of individuals almost always. I’m aware that Venn diagram is a paradox, but I believe it.
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I guess there was a feminist critique of Infinite Jest years ago and Foster Wallace replied saying that he was unaware that he was asserting his phallus over the canon of American literature in writing such a lengthy work, he just had lots to say. Jest is a great novel, definately, but people are so goddamn weary of books of that length in the market (it is a publishing market after all). I agree with Cormac. There is so much out there to read, so much fantastic literature, i can no longer dedicate weeks to someones “opus”, it’s too much to ask. strip it down or make it a trilogy or something.
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November 13th, 2009 / 1:41 pmBlake Butler—
ah. then if you, i guess so too the world.
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November 13th, 2009 / 2:16 pmjpfacto—
It’s an informed stance. I’ve worked in bookstores. There are exceptions, sure. Maybe the literary subculture that can withstand the digestion of McSweeney Volumes can deal with these freakshows (yours not mine) but not I sir. It’s a chore and nobody is that important anymore.
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I want to write a big sprawling opus one day, like McCarthy already did twice, with Suttree and Blood Meridian. And, by the way, if you like them, there’s a really good one coming out from Dalkey Archive Press next year: Witz, by Joshua Cohen.
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i love big books. i love small books.
i love to love small books while loving big books.
text immersion is fun. people should stop their precious time hoarding and learn to love swimming in big. the count of monte cristo is the most fun i’ve ever had reading a book. brothers karamazov and moby dick would be right up there as well.
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November 13th, 2009 / 2:32 pmKen Baumann—
agreed
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For me, the benefit of length in a novel is a more acute sense of the passage of time (because more of it is actually passing), and this is my only consideration when I consider the relative length of a book. Otherwise, a book/story is whatever size it happens at, for me. What does size matter, otherwise? We’re not farmers going to the state fair to compete with vegetable, dammit. One size fits none.
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2666
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almanac of the dead
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Dear everybody,
Harry Potter.
Game, set, match.
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Sorry, baffled. As far as I can remember, Tristram Shandy (now available in a 656-page pb) was originally published in something like 7 volumes, each of which was small enough to fit in the pocket of a frock coat. Bleak House (896 pp from Signet) was originally serialized. A la recherche du temps perdu was published in installments. The three-volume novel was once a staple of the commercial lending libraries in Britain – novels had to be up to a certain length so that libraries could lend them out a third at a time. Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time consists, I seem to remember, of 12 books forming a larger whole – each was issued separately. (I do have them now in a single volume, but when I began reading them the last three had not yet been written.) It might be daunting to tackle a 1200-page book, but it wouldn’t be, surely, to read one 100-page installment a month for 12 months by a writer one admired (don’t many of us, in fact, happily read multiple posts daily by bloggers we admire?). So the problem is not really readers’ attention spans, the problem is, it seems, with a form of packaging that suggests novel reading should be governed by the rules of the all-you-can-eat buffet. I know Philip Roth thinks a novel should be read in two weeks, but I like Sterne, Dickens and Proust better than Roth, and none wrote for the two-week dash.
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