F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote in a letter to Thomas Wolfe, "You're a putter-inner, and I'm a taker-outer." Fitzgerald was defending himself against Wolfe's belief that a novelist couldn't be taken seriously until he or she had produced something that could hold up a three-legged sofa. These days, few people wade through Wolfe's 500-page-plus "Look Homeward", "Angel", while "The Great Gatsby", pushed to 200 pages in my edition by a lengthy preface and large type, is generally held to be novelistic perfection.
Putters-in and takers-out is as good a way as any to classify novelists. Putters-in: writers who pile on atmosphere, adjectives, and arguments, who share with readers all their thoughts and research, who follow storylines like a dog on the loose. Takers-out: writers who fiddle with each comma and finesse every word, who know exactly what Samuel Johnson meant when he said that when you think you've written a particularly fine passage, strike it out.
You can tell my bias. I admire short novels and have written a couple myself. A matter of aesthetic taste and personal predilection, of course. Which doesn't mean I can't tuck into, say, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Christina Stead, Patrick White, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer or Rohinton Mistry. I just don't think that their novels are superior because of their length than to the work of Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Richard Hughes, Carson McCullers, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Muriel Spark, Jamaica Kincaid, Joanna Russ, Nicholson Baker, Paul Bailey, Gerald Murnane and Simon Leys, to name only a few who have written "slim" volumes. And I certainly don't think posterity is busy weighing Moby Dick in one hand, Heart of Darkness in the other, and declaring Melville a greater genius than Conrad because his book is heavier.
Yet the general attitude is still Wolfe's: to be a literary contender you have to have poundage. To win prizes, it is almost a prerequisite. Why else would writers such as Michael Chabon and Jeffrey Eugenides, both of whom have written beautiful short novels, bulk up, arguably to their detriment, except in quest of Pulitzers? Big, baggy, messy-that's the order of the day. Zadie Smith's White Teeth has been praised as "a divine mess"; Dave Eggers's You Shall Know Our Velocity as "a messy, funny book." A summary of the judgements on Donna Tartt's A Little Friend: a lumpish mess. These books are not exceptions. More and more novels, especially since the success of The Corrections, are composed of set pieces or riffs strung together, never mind the resulting ungainliness; if one part doesn't work, another will. Shapely, cohesive, edited, these books aren't.
Perhaps readers actually do baulk at paying ?12 for a novel they will-ill-advisedly-scoot through in a sitting, no matter if the time and skill that went into writing it exceeds by far the effort that goes into most novels triple the length. Maybe it's always been this way: when "The Great Gatsby" was published, its shortness was held against it. HL Mencken dismissed as "a glorified anecdote" and the book bombed. Despite a long list of short novels that have had staying power, publishers are still mindful of this prejudice on the part of readers and reviewers and often ask writers to pad out short novels. The term "novella" is a marketing kiss of death.
Part of the problem is that short novels, following the example of Milan Kundera and Alessandro Baricco, have become showcases for lyrical, moody, portentously European prose, for events that occur in "an iceblink of memory," as Don DeLillo describes it in The Body Artist (a novel that is decidedly Kundera-ish in tone and length). That short novels can be tough, specific, and encompassing can come as a surprise to readers. Sinew and bone as opposed to breath made cloudy by the cold.
Reviews of my two novels almost always comment on their shortness, sometimes rudely in the manner of Mencken, but more often kindly, with the expressed hope that my work won't be overlooked because of its length. My career probably would benefit if I could fatten up my books, but I can't. When I'm asked why I write short works, I usually say I trained as a poet or teethed on Samuel Beckett, but the fact of the matter is that I'm a compulsive, unsentimental winnower in all areas of my life. A champion chucker-out. I abhor clutter and inexactitude, cherish utility and severity. As EB White said, literary style is a matter of attitudes of mind, not principles of composition.
David Mamet has written a brilliant-and very brief-essay on the need for spaciousness and elegance in writing, for leaving out what we can hear or imagine on our own: "This is the genius of Bach and the overwhelming demand of dramaturgy... how much can one remove and still have the composition be intelligible? Chekhov removed the plot, Pinter, elaborating, removed the history; Beckett, the characterisation. We hear it anyway." But novelists are now writing as if we can't "hear" anything. And perhaps we are losing that ability. Under the onslaught of literal-minded television shows and movies, our imaginations are atrophying; we expect to have everything spelled out for us. It seems sometimes that our only expectation of novels is that they be vast, so that we can float on a burble of words, buoyant and unthinking, as if taking a dip in the Dead Sea.
