“The good thing about the novel is that it can really be anything.”
—Robert Glück, Paris Review interview (Art of Fiction no. 260), Fall 2023
Novels are vexing. Reading them, writing them, thinking about them. Vexing!
I write this having read another novel that had lots of elements I enjoyed and yet by the end I was wondering if it had been worth my time and attention. I write this also while writing notes for two projects that might turn into novels one day far in the future. I write this while thinking about what to do with a novel I wrote from 2016 to 2018 that has not found, and likely will not find, a publisher. (The last time a novel I wrote failed completely, I turned it into a short story that is also kind of an essay about a failed novel — “After the End of the End of the World” — and while I’m proud of that work, I think it’s likely a trick that only works once.)
I have always found novels vexing, which is perhaps why I devoted my PhD dissertation to them. No literary form annoys me as much as novels, yet that annoyance is tied to desire and wonder, not contempt or hatred.
However, not all that long ago I did write a piece titled “‘It’s Good to Hate Novels,’ He Said Lovingly”. I still agree with most of what I wrote there. But the title was intended for humor. It’s not that I hate novels or even that I think it’s good to hate them. But let’s be honest. Novels are vexing.
Novels require more time and attention than some other forms of entertainment, especially if those novels are long, and especially if, like me, you are not a speed reader. (I read a lot, but I am not fast; I am persistent and eclectic.) I am not someone who feels at all compelled to keep reading a book if I lose interest. Once it feels like too much of a slog, I toss a book aside and move to another. Life is too short, the number of books to read too many. Wasting time with tedious books is not a type of sadism that appeals to me. (I might come back to the book at another time, especially if I feel more open to what it has to offer.) That’s an easy choice, and it’s a choice that has kept me able to read novels and sometimes even to finish reading them.
The vexation comes from books that take a lot of time and attention and offer little in return. If all I want is some basic entertainment, there are far easier sources these days. Novels have to offer more.
In my most recent post, I described dragging myself through Ramsey Campbell’s 1989 novel Ancient Images and being frustrated at how unnecessary the book was and how much time I had devoted to it. I felt a bit guilty for saying such negative things about a book that isn’t really doing any harm in the world, a book by a writer I have appreciated quite a bit in the past, so I immediately started reading another Campbell novel, one that had all the signs of being more to my taste: his 1983 novel Incarnate. This is generally said to be among Campbell’s best — S.T. Joshi, in Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction, even says of Incarnate that the “complexity of the plot, the intricate interweaving of narratives and narrative voices, the suppleness and richness of the prose, and the harrowing nature of the central horror—dreams that are so real that they not only are taken for reality but actually replace it—all fuse into one of the finest weird novels of the second half of the twentieth century.” Joshi is not someone whose taste I generally share, but still, if he declares a book to be among the best of the second half of the 20th century, that seems like something worth reading, no?
Certainly, it has more to offer than Ancient Images. Its first quarter or so is gripping and evocative, intellectually pleasurable, with some aesthetically powerful moments. As the book continues, what it lacks is variety of pleasures, so there is very little later that expands or improves on what comes in its initial 150 pages. Closing the book after reading its full 500 pages, I felt that Incarnate provided too little in return for the time I gave it. I could have done something other than read the book, and that other something would have been at least as fulfilling. I gave this book whole chunks of my days, and got a truly compelling first quarter-to-a-third and then less and less and less until ultimately the ending fizzled out. Contra Joshi, the plot is not especially complex, though it is sodden with detail. That’s the fundamental problem with Incarnate. You could chop 200 pages from it and not lose anything vital. It gets touted as a work of quasi-philosophical fiction, but books like Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation, and a lot of Philip K. Dick’s novels cover similar metaphysical concerns with significantly more force and terror in less than half the length.
The real problem, of course, could be me. The problem is me. I do not write about this book in some faux-objective way. I liked a lot of it, truly, and felt let down by it, truly, but I know other readers would have a different experience. Joshi writes of Incarnate: “Lengthy though it is, it is one of those rare novels that one does not wish to come to an end.” I believe his enthusiasm is honest and real, but he should speak for himself — his “one” there does not include me.
A battle of tastes and preferences is a waste of time, but we might redeem it with a pause to reflect on how and why we read, and what experiences reading provides, particularly with novels longer than 400 or so pages. Novels that ask for a lot from readers.
Was my problem with Incarnate really just its length? Mostly, yes. Even the other things that bothered me (some weak characterization here and there, some annoying narrative tendencies) glared because of the girth. Why am I unsatisfied with this? became a constant refrain in my head throughout the second half of the novel, and again and again I could only answer, Because this book needed a more determined editor.
I wondered then: what novels of at least 500 pages have, for me, been satisfactory reading experiences by the end? Few! Selection bias gets in the way here, as I do not finish reading a lot of novels of that length. (The risk of dissatisfaction and wasted time is too great!) Nonetheless, some of my favorite novels are big ones: Moby-Dick, Bleak House, Little Dorritt, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina (which, if pressed, I would say is my favorite novel), War and Peace, The Lord of the Rings, Invisible Man, Dhalgren, Mason & Dixon (Pynchon), Merry Men (Chute), Mosquito (Jones), The Savage Detectives (Bolaño), 2666 (also Bolaño), A Little Life (Yanagihara)… Major reading experiences, major moments in my existence and imagination. (Though I’ve read it a few times, I haven’t reread Crime and Punishment in at least 15 years and still its characters and scenes remain vivid in my mind, more vivid than those of books I read only a few months ago. That’s true of every title there, though some of them I have visited or revisited more recently.) I don’t begrudge a moment of reading any of those novels, even though sometimes the reading included hours of incomprehension or even boredom. But the incomprehension and boredom felt in service to something — for instance, I was determined to find a way to make sense of Delany’s Dhalgren because for whatever reason (youthful pride?) I did not want it to defeat me, and in the process of finding ways to understand it, I discovered not only that I did have some understanding but that the book was speaking to me and my life in ways no other book had. Parts of Moby-Dick and War and Peace I found mind-numbingly boring, and yet I gave them some attention — not the deep attention of the parts I most loved, but attention — and got something from them because the boredom felt somehow integral to the experience. (It also helped that I read them both during a summer in Mexico when they were the only English-language books I had with me.) I intuited that without the boredom I would not appreciate some of the most astonishing moments of those books.
What causes boredom changes with time and circumstance. When I first read Anna Karenina, I could barely get through any of the sections about Levin without nodding off. At some point, though, I came to love Levin, and in rereading the book a decade after I first read it, it was the Levin sections that most enraptured me.
I would not read any of those books today in the same way I did when I first read them, and some I might not even be able to finish nowadays, but each was an important book to me at the time, and part of what made them important was their length.
Novels are vexing. And magnificent.
We can have really complicated relationships to long novels because of how demanding they are on our time and imaginations. I keep meaning to reread Pynchon’s Against the Day, which I devoured in something like a fugue state when it first came out, eyes bleary and brain pummelled, and it seemed to me then to be perhaps the greatest science fiction novel ever written (its only competition Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Likes Grains of Sand), but it also struck me as incredibly annoying at times, difficult to wrap my brain around, an enigma. I would love to give it some better time and attention, but it’s 1,000 big pages of fairly small type. What if now, to my older self, it all just rings hollow? Then I will have learned how my tastes and enthusiasms have changed since 2006, but if that’s all I get from reading 1,000 pages, it will feel like quite a waste of time and effort.
A short novel that doesn’t satisfy can be forgotten quickly, but it’s hard not to resent a long novel that ultimately disappoints.
After finishing Incarnate, I asked myself what would have felt satisfying at that length. What was the more that I yearned for? This is an important question, first just because of my own desires as a reader and writer, but more generally (regardless of the self-centered or mercenary question of what I, myself, want to aim to accomplish), the question is important because it helps us understand the pitfalls and potentials of the hugely open form we call the novel.
Too often, the novel’s formal openness, its general lack of definition, proves to be a particular novel’s undoing, because the writer must create some constraints to bring the form into vision, yet as often as not those constraints are too constraining — instead of propelling imagination, they shackle it.
One of the most vexing things about novels is that many of them have the ingredients of a better form of themselves. (In that, they are much like human beings!) Incarnate could have been more satisfying for me as a reader if it leaned in to the surrealism Campbell sometimes quite beautifully brings to bear on this story of dreams, and if it heightened the idea of reality itself being porous. It’s all there, but gets drowned out in the machinations of plot and incident, all the pointless details about characters and settings, the clutter that makes the book seem more complex than it is. It’s a book about irrational things, but it cages its material in a much too rational form.
I think of what Robert Glück has said about the “middle distance” in narrative:
Most narrative takes place in the middle distance, which is basically what someone can see. So, Tony walks into the room: He walks into the room, he sits down at the pine table, he wears a green blazer and a fedora with a green feather. Working on this level, I create a kind of guided daydream. Readers project into it and make a story-world in their brains. But why? The naturalism this method supports is a set of conventions that leads to the status quo. The more “normal” the convention, the more it supports the status quo. We take this kind of writing as natural but Chaucer would not have, or Sappho, or some tribal writer. Since I’m the writer, and I can include anything I want, what has made me confine my work to this small palette? Why don’t I say, Tony walks in and relives the orgasm he had that morning. I could say how much money Tony has in his wallet or bank account, as Balzac might have done. I could say what Tony will be thinking about tomorrow, what he will dream tonight, how he emerged from his mother’s vagina, how English torques his brain, what he knows subliminally, Bob’s smell perhaps. I could say how a flu virus is commencing but not yet experienced, how Tony is going to die. I could talk about Tony’s Grandfather’s journey to America. A human being is large and complicated, and the middle distance diminishes him or her.
Incarnate, like so many novels, is trapped in the middle distance of narration. That’s common, even to some of the long novels I listed as great reading experiences in my life. The really unsatisfying thing about Campbell’s novel is how little it adds up to.
Endings are difficult. How do you leave a reader feeling like the journey was worth it? That’s what the reading of a novel is: a journey. Where does it take us?
I tend to think of what I want from the ending of nearly any work of fiction as an opening out. But in many ways what I mean is closer to something like transcendence, even though if I were to say I want fiction to be transcendent, even I would want to kick me for being pretentious. But yes, that’s what I find most satisfying: a narrative that transcends the circumstances of its materials, that provides a richer sense of experience, existence, and possibility than a summary of the story alone would ever provide, a conclusion that continues and expands the vision the book placed in my brain. And Incarnate has some of that, certainly more so than Ancient Images. There are a couple of wonderfully resonant moments where reality and dreams mingle, where we don’t know which is which. That’s beautiful stuff and deserves all the celebration it has received. But it’s a relatively small part of a 500-page novel.
Once again, length matters. What makes a short story transcendent may get lost or diffused in a novel. (Novels are vexing!) Because of their length, novels are inevitably messy. The longer they get, the messier they are. All of the long novels I listed above as important reading experiences in my life are also novels that have a bagginess to them. Yet the bagginess is part of their power and meaning. The digressions, tangents, divagations, sidetracks, meanderings all work to create a breadth of vision for the book and a depth of experience for the reader that proves essential — while any reader could consider parts of each of those books unnecessary to the plot or even the general meaning, removing them would empty out the experience. The extraneous material isn’t actually extraneous, it’s key to what those novels achieve. All the stuff about whaling in Moby-Dick could, indeed, be removed without harming any individual element of the novel, but as dull as some of that material can be, the book without it would be so much poorer. Many long novels struggle with this, because it requires a certain genius to be able to shape meaning in a mound of words, but that’s the great thrill of the long, involved book.
Alas, I have nothing especially transcendent to end with here. Novels are vexing. Long novels especially so. Yet it remains worth risking vexation — as both reader and writer — for the chance of encountering the beauty and awe that the best novels provide. That beauty and awe is partly a function of the text itself, partly of the reader, who life and tastes and moods affect how they welcome the text into their mind. May we all find the novels we need, and not let the ones we don’t need capture too much of our attention.
