The 1000 Pager

One of the first things you learn in writing workshop is that everything needs to be shorter. Four lines of dialogue should be one; a page should be a paragraph; two of characters should be composited, two more are unnecessary. Brevity is the soul of wit. Nothing is so poetic in ten words that can’t be more readable in six.

So 1000 page words are inherently ridiculous. Surely something could have been sped up, trimmed, combined, cancelled. The writers of epic fantasy novels - which regularly push into the quadruple digits - love to swing their appendix: George R. R. Marten’s Feast for Crows, part 4 in a 7 part series, flaunts over a thousand distinctive characters, each with a rank, occupation, and family history stretching back hundreds of years, for those fans devoted and demented enough to explore the endless arcana that accrues to fantasy.

And what of that near-endangered beast, the 1000-page literary novel?

Thomas Pynchon, a writer personally and stylistically averse to trends, published Against the Day last year. The book could be a sadistic game played on the reader. It’s overwritten to an unimaginable extreme, as if Faulkner imbibed psychedelics and wrote an encyclopedia of fake science. It is quite possible to follow a character for several hundred pages and still be confused about his motivation, his occupation, and his name. It may all make sense eventually, but who can say? I’ve been reading the damn thing for 8 months, and I’m not yet halfway through.

We expect a certain reserved grace from the masters as they age (like whores and old buildings, Noah Cross said) into respectability. Who doesn’t await the next Philip Roth masterwork, slim enough to read in between meetings of your local Book Club? Cormac McCarthy hit Oprah with “The Road,” which is very much McCarthy’s unique and difficult brand of apocalyptic minimalism, but it’s a book that finds one right tone and sticks with it, plowing forward with the narrative directness of a dead man walking to Hell and praying for Heaven.

The tone of Against the Day is madcap, which is to say, either tuneful (full of innumerable moods and genres befitting a tale told by a literary lion in his early winter) or toneless (lacking a genuine center, swirling in the lazy circles you’d expect from a once-great descending into self-parody). But therein lies the fun of the very very long book, from Brothers Karamazov to Ulysses to Against the Day – the joy of seeing a great artist casting caution and editorial advice to the wind, blowing on all cylinders, damn the torpedoes, let the world engine stop spinning! Brothers K features Dostoyevsky at his operatic worst (surely, no women will ever talk longer with more exclamation points) and his transcendent best (Ivan’s Devil, The Grand Inquisitor). Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is rife with shoddy plotting and lacks the dark-witted brevity of his more famous works like Carrie and Cujo (and the delicate time-spanning of the lengthy It). But King’s unbridled crazy passion for the story pulses in every little page. King never quite figures out what the Dark Tower is, but he invites the reader into his own confusion and asks them to appreciate his magnum opus as much for its flaws as its grandeur, like a beloved child born with a magnificent deformity.

That’s the bliss of the thousand pager – the knowledge of its own bloated imperfection keeps the TRUE book – the edited version, the final draft, the answer to the question – tantalizingly out of sight. When you hold American Pastoral, its American Pastoral. When you hold Against the Day (with two hands, sweating from exertion), you’re holding the myriad potentiality for something different, better, smaller, more focused – a better book, yet one hermetically sealed in its own perfection. A 1000 pager wraps you in a world and dares you to reimagine it – it reminds you of a time when novels were the interactive medium.