Cases in point: the novels of Stephen King. I believe many of King's novels are really obese. Stephen King remains one of my favorite writers. I think his book ON WRITING is both a terrific memoir and great how-to text. And it's short! That's why I can't understand why he feels the need to write books that are so frickin' chunky. Looking at my bookshelf, where I have several King novels, I see some fat tubs of prose. DUMA KEY needs "verbo-suction" at nearly 800 pages. And both IT and THE "Complete and Uncut" STAND both go well over 1100 pounds. . .I mean pages. These are fat books!
I'm sure people will say that they love King's lack of brevity. They feel that his lengthy narration with his intricate descriptions of place, his many insertions of elements of our pop culture, and his monstrous number of characters are what make him special. I won't argue with your taste. It just isn't for me. I have had a hard time finishing the last few King reads I began, including UNDER THE DOME, the source of the TV mini-series and over 1300 pages on my Nook. I couldn't finish BAG OF BONES. It is the first King novel that I started that I just couldn't stand to finish because it was too damn fat. Give me the days of SALEM'S LOT and THE SHINING once again.
Now to my next prosy overeater. I just finished my third or fourth Jack Reacher novel, PERSUADER. I discovered the Lee Child series of books shortly before Tom Cruise starred in the eponymous Jack Reacher movie. Reacher is a vagabond, a traveling man, who graduated from West Point and had a 12 or 13 year career as an officer in the MP's. His exploits there trained him well for what he does which is travel identity-less around the country doing good on his own terms, while doing in lots of bad guys. The Reacher novels are good books. Fun to read. But obese. PERSUADER is 480 pages long and would be great at 280. The hero Jack Reacher is lean and tough. This novel has a big roll hanging over its belt. There is one scene where Jack Reacher sneaks out the upstairs window of a seaside mansion and makes his way across the yard on a rainy, windy night. The reader is forced to step on every frickin' brick as Jack descends the wall. You get soaked from the description of the rain. Is this effective writing? Of course, and I would love it in a suspenseful short story. Not a fat novel. The pages of description slow the book down and. . .horror of horrors. . .make me want to skip ahead to see just where this story is going.
Reading PERSUADER brought me to this topic along with reading Walter Mosley's newest Easy Rollins book LITTLE GREEN, a tough, sinewy, and svelte novel. If you've never read Walter Mosley, ya gotta! In his Easy Rollins books, Rollins chronicles post-World War II African-American culture in Southern California with amazing sensitivity, objectivity, and awareness. "Easy" is a character like Jack Reacher in that he does good things, most of the time, for people, and some bad people get done in along they way. But Easy is also is a philosopher, a social critic, and the soul of his people and his time. The prose of Mosley's novel is rich and beautiful and TIGHT! In spinning a tale of Los Angeles of the late sixties on Sunset Strip and in the enclaves of hippies, Mosley's LITTLE GREEN sends Rollins on a fascinating quest for redemption and for the right to be alive. And he does it in 280 beautiful pages. Some other books that are wonderful in both their eloquence and brevity are OF MICE AND MEN of by John Steinbeck, the Lew Archer novels of Ross McDonald, the novels of Richard Brautigan, and the aforementioned LORD OF THE FLIES by William Golding. Of course, there are hundreds more
Certainly, there are wonderful novels that need to be 900 or 1000 pages long. Books like the complete LES MISERABLES and the LORD OF THE RING trilogy come to my mind, and also WAR AND PEACE, the greatness of which I can't attest to because I never read it. (In fact, I'm not sure that I know many people who have.) But there are reasons why we find these books on the classics shelf at the book store. The classic status gives those book the right to be measured both in pages and pounds.
Why are there so many obese volumes? I don't for sure, but I would guess the public demands them. A bunch of enablers, popular fiction readers demand their beach-reads and guilty pleasures be fattened up so they get the most of their favorite writer for their money. In response to the public demand, I imagine that editors of successful pop authors push their clients to be long rather than short-winded. I wish that instead they would give each author a 300 page per book limit, except on their 50th birthdays when they get to have 400. I can't see this prose diet being adopted, I'm afraid.
Last year I railed quietly against Stephen King's largeness in this blog:
http://wwwmotleyplayer.blogspot.com/2013/06/another-day-another-gigundo-stephen.html
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