Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, counsels Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest. Even at the turn of the century, novels that needed more than one set of hard covers to get to the point were considered a bit ridiculous, a relic of a leisured age when the daughters of the aristocracy had an awful lot of time to kill, and Miss Prism is of course a figure of fun. But when it comes to seriously long novels, I think I'm on her side.
Partly this is because there are artistic feats that only a real doorstopper can pull off: the impression of having seen a social world complete that one gets from the best of the 19th-century novels is something that just isn't possible in a few hundred pages. The sense of an almost panoptic imagination that you get from Middlemarch, say, seeing into every heart, understanding every stratum of society and how they mesh together, is an endeavour that takes time, and quite a few pages.
The demise of the leisure class, and an alienated sense that the modern world is too complex and atomised to be compassed in a single story, were thought to have killed off the long novel. But the exceptions to this rule include many of the towering achievements of 20th century fiction - Remembrance of Things Past, The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities. And in more recent novels, like Don DeLillo's Underworld, there is an exhilarating return to the 19th century ambition of capturing a world whole (albeit by means of a more oblique, modernist technique).
While it's true that the best short story writers - Alice Munro springs to mind - choose their details so well that they seem to open onto novel-sized stories in a few pages, the focus is necessarily narrow.
With the masterpieces of the supersized story, there's also a kind of spectacular thrill at seeing so much material being suspended on a single narrative thread, how hundreds of pages can be shaped to hang together in a unified work of art. This doesn't invariably come off, and many of these narrative marathons get drawn into odd diversions, the "baggy monsters" that Henry James sniffed at among Victorian novels. Sometimes this brings an enriching sense of the variousness of the world; sometimes it's just a diversion. And yet, if the writing's good enough, I'm often happy to take the scenic route.
And I have to confess that there are other, perhaps more infantile, pleasures to be had from the long read. If you're as slow a reader as me, the things can be around the house for months, and there is a possibly soppy sense of developing a strange kind of relationship with the book. Travelling alone, or on one occasion, stuck in hospital for a long stretch after an accident, they offer a welcome kind of virtual company: one gets to enjoy spending time with the same authorial voice.
You folks are a high-toned bunch so maybe you're above this kind of gratification. Let me know, and make those answers nice and long.
