The Long and Short of It

Marginal Revolution has been puzzling over short books v. long books. Let me weigh in with a personal observation.

I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid. Given the choice, I always voted for short stories because they were, well, short.

Imagine my surprise, the summer I was 14 when I fell into W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and more or less sank—conquered, for the first time, with the sense of what it was to be totally enveloped by a book, as an alternate life, so fully realized that I didn’t want it to end. I had the experience a few times more in my adolescence—I remember reading one by Thomas B. Costain, though at this point I can’t remember much of anything except the sense of being committed to it (it might have been this one). I remember reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden, (and being struck, inter alia, by the Chinese body-servant who reads Marcus Aurelius in his cupboard-bed (and never made it to the movie at all)).

But the real breakthrough for me was, and remains, War and Peace, one novel which I have always insisted is too short. It’s a same-only-different world, as convincing as one’s own, but more luminous and intense. I did not, and do not, want it to end.

I’ve come to feel the same way about a few other novels in life, mostly the usual suspects: Middlemarch, Remembrance of Things Past, that sort of thing, you get the drift. But my immediate point is: a long novel is not just a short story made longer. A long novel can achieve a kind of richness and texture a short story (alone) can never do.

There are complications. Some short-story novels can give the complete-world feel through extended exposure: I think of Bernard Malamud’s “parables of New York immigrant life,” as they are called, or Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories. And as if to complicate matters War and Peace itself is not so much a novel as a series of intensely articulated episodes, almost any one of which would be enough on its own to make the reputation of almost any lesser writer. On the other hand, a few novelists—Faulkner, Balzac—carry the “fully realized world” over their entire corpus. Indeed, I haven’t any idea where to put Proust: did he write one big book, or a series of interlocked novellae?

I don’t mean to knock the idea of the individual short story; plenty of them are little jewels. Indeed, some of the most arresting achieve the novelistic trick of capturing a whole world (Faulkner’s That Evening Sun is a favorite example). It’s wonderful. But it’s not the same thing. The relationship is not linear. A novel is not just a short story writ long.