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How long should a novel be?

JA April 06

Any discussion about the ‘right’ length for a novel will probably end up being dizzyingly circular – a novel is as long as it is after all and, more often than not, what it comes down to is simply a matter of personal taste.

I don’t feel too strong either way, but if anything I do tend to gravitate towards shorter reads like The Outsider, Things We Didn’t See Coming, On Chesil Beach, Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar and so on, simply because I feel that there’s a sparseness there that often goes unrecognised. A short novel has to be expertly weighted – there’s no room for dull, pondering descriptions in which one character takes five pages to walk down a corridor, no room for a faltering pace or languid prose. This is not to say that a long book can’t be equally as good (indeed ‘too long’ is simply just a euphemism for badly paced), but there’s a tightness in shorter books that means anything unnecessary has to be culled. They’re often distilled, purer versions of themselves, as this piece from the Guardian blog points out.

Personal preference is probably the first thing people would think of when it comes to any question on the length of books, but this piece by US author Charlie Stross interestingly points out another factor – that of market forces. I wonder how many consumers realise the influence of this on their own reading habits. We may often have to choose between The Great Gatsby (50 000 words) and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (around 480 000), but our choices are limited by what the industry is willing to publish, which in turn rides on what they are able to sell. In print anyway, book length is carefully tied to price. Novels these days can range anywhere between 60 000 to 150 000 words, and costs generally hover around $24.95 to $29.95 for your average paperback, to $49.95 for the latest, big-name hardcover.

Stross writes that novels from the Victorian era were often so long because they were sold as serials in weekly periodicals or journals before being republished as bound books. Many of Charles Dickens’ best-known works like Bleak House and David Copperfield began life in this format. In contrast, while many science fiction novels written during the 1920s to 50s were serialised as well, few of them are greater than 60 000 words. This again was due to the publication – this time pulp magazines sold on newsstands and street corners – and their perceived audience. Extracts needed to be punchy and full of action, yet short enough to leave room for other stories so that readers could be assured of variety. Equally, they needed to be a predicable, finite length, which, during those times, meant short and sharp.

During the 1980s and 90s trends changed again. This was the age of mass-market paperbacks, in which thrillers, crime and romance novels could be produced cheaply and efficiently. Matthew Reilly, Di Morrissey, Bryce Courtney and the like were everywhere. Length was almost a necessity for those who equated the number of pages with maximum value per dollar, and for customers who wanted to be immersed in a good, long read. Stross describes it like so:

Put yourself in the position of a bored browser in front of a supermarket wire-rack, contemplating novels by two authors you've never read. They both cost the same, and you have enough pocket money to buy one. The year is 1980; LibraryThing or other internet resources aren't available. How do you make your mind up? Well, you remember what you've heard about the authors, and you look at the cover painting, and you read the back flap blurb. Assuming all of these are equal ... you probably buy on weight, because you subconsciously anticipate a longer reading experience and, all things considered, good experiences that last longer are better than short ones. Remember that the actual cost of the paper and ink is only a small component of the retail price of a book — around 10-15%. Increasing a book block's size from 150 pages to 180 pages is cheap. And so, from the 1960s to the 1990s, publishers unconsciously trained readers to expect longer novels.

Enter the digital age. Australia is not there yet but by all accounts ebooks are only a short whistle away and digital retailers are set to become one of the dominant strands of distribution. The interesting thing here is that length is less of concern both ways. With print, publishers needed to be able to charge a certain amount for a book to make it profitable. This, coupled with the perceived length=value mentality, meant that shorter books and novellas became less prominent and the average word count gradually increased. With the digital, short and micro fiction are again becoming popular, especially for testing the waters. Readers too seem to prefer shorter works due to aesthetic preference and worries about eye strain (even though many argue that reading on screen does not actually cause muscle stress). Production costs are cheaper and the industry is less restricted by geography, which all in all suggests that we might see a wider variety of lengths and formats when it comes to reading in the digital age. I think this will probably include a fair few 500 page blockbusters as we get used to reading long-form texts on screen, but personally I’m also looking forward to a revival of the novella, short fiction and all of their various cousins.

 

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