In Praise of the Big Book - Most of it

There's a reason that all sorts of major athletic competitions are over in a minute or two. If most olympic athletes had to operate at peak performance past two minutes, they would fail at best to perform at their optimum, injure themselves permanently at worst. In the same way, there is no way to expect any kind of aesthetic perfection from long-form narrative. The best short stories are perfect, they are self-contained worlds which create multitudes of meaning that never stop yielding possibilities no matter how often you ponder them. Over the last ten years I've thought of so many different possibilities for what the end of Chekhov's The Black Monk might mean that it would be an entire podcast to list them all. Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants is little but a conversation that can mean an exponential multiplicity of different situations. The chill of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown can make you speculate your whole life long about America's origins, and wonder how many puritans, how many Christians through the millennia, went through the motions of faith while truly believing in nothing, or even only the Devil, and how that lack of faith may have corrupted the Christian faith itself. And it would be pointless to get started on all the potential meanings in Kafka's Before the Law or Borges's The Other, because both are not even a single page long, would take you literally three minutes to read, and have enough potential meanings to ponder for a lifetime and never get past their first door. But meaning does not necessarily connote intellectual meaning, it can also connote emotional meaning. My personal favorite writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, is suddenly an almost forgotten master of the short story, and his short stories do not have the subtleties of Borges or Kafka. They are virtually folk tales, like Hans Christian Anderson or Edgar Allen Poe in their different ways, or Giovanni Verga and Flannery O'Connor, and they evoke not speculation but sense-impression, so grounded are they all in various pre-literate oral traditions that they evoke the entire worldview of a place and time, not only the superstitions and fears of distant people, but their hopes and values, and to me, that's almost more worthwhile than the more intellectual type, save Chekhov, who empathized with other humans as though they lived inside his own skin.

On the other hand, even the best big books have to make aesthetic contortions of logic and structure and observation, with a hundred pages at a time of boredom to be endured until the narrative picks up again. Dostoevsky called Tolstoy's 864 page Anna Karenina a flawless work of art, and it's definitely more flawless than Dostoevsky's four final loose baggy monsters, but Book III of Anna Karenina, with all its prattling on about Levin's land dealings, would strain even the most business-savvy farmer. In terms of perfect novels, One might say The Great Gatsby is perfect, or Pride and Prejudice, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or Dostoevsky's earlier and very lean Notes from the Underground, or Stefan Zweig's Chess Story, or Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, the latter three are short enough that they might fall into the novella category rather than novel, and personally, I think the novella is a particularly great because it can feature a straight-forward narrative without creating its aesthetic splendors by elision as the short stories have to almost inevitably - the unsaid being as important as the said, nor does it allow its author a yield to temptation of taking us through every narrative permutation of which they can think, no matter how dubious the connection to the rest of the book.

And then of course, there's Shakespeare, writer of writers, who takes us through so many permutations and contortions of logic and structure and character paradox that it's almost impossible to say that Shakespeare has any form at all. Perhaps he was writing the equivalent of the loose baggy monster in an era when few writers knew how to construct a story that was more than a hundred pages long - even Don Quixote is more a collection of short stories than a connected narrative, but because they're so short in comparison to later greats like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Melville, they scorch on both the stage and the page. The plays absorb us in as other writer can, and spit us out a different person.

And then, even over Shakespeare, there's the 'BIGGEST' book of them all, the Holy Bible, a work probably collated, redacted, edited, and marinated over a period of 2000 years. A lot of people in our modern age hate the Bible, I think it's still the greatest book ever written, containing everything from the largest cosmic questions to the smallest domestic squabbles, the best intentions to the most appallingly violent ones, the highest poetry to the lowest comedy,  - and yes, there is comedy in the Bible all over the place. The Bible is an anthology that has themes for every situation, and as the universal relatability of its themes pops up again and again in relation to the problems of every generation, one can only conclude that even if the Bible gets all kinds of specifics wrong, it is an eternal book. And because its themes and characters are so universally relatable to everyday life, encounters with the Bible completely change our thinking about life. For good or ill, there has never been a more powerful work of literature.

And why might that be? I would imagine that the limit for a book to have no excess verbiage is probably around 375 pages, but the big novel, the best of them anyway, is the nearest thing to lived experience that we get without living life. Clive James, as we said a few podcasts ago, defined fiction as 'life without the dull bits', ...well.., in big books the dull bits are definitely there, ditto in the big symphonies and operas, the long-form TV shows and double albums. But here's to them. Part of living life is living through the disappointing passages, which make the exciting parts all the sweeter. Even the best long novels will have 1 dull page for every 9 exciting ones, and you will be grateful for so little dullness than rather so much. And as we take them in, necessarily little by little, our impressions of these works cannot possibly be instant. We don't just watch the story evolve, we evolve alongside the story, often having to leave and return to it in the middle, bringing all sorts of unrelated new experiences to the book, pondering these stories and characters and themes for days.