Jorge Luis Borges once said he never read Proust because parts of Remembrance of Things Past were as boring as real life. So when is a novel too long? This question is on my mind because I'm about one third the way through Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, about the point at which Laura Miller says the novel starts to come into focus as a coherent narrative. The prognosis isn't good, however: she reports that the novel "eventually wobbles out of focus again, leaving the diligent reader with a grab bag of themes to consider." In itself, a grab bag of themes isn't necessarily a defect, but the prospect of dealing with 1,085 pages worth of disconnected themes is daunting.
So how long should a novel be? As long as it takes to tell its story, of course. But how long is that? I can already see that 1,085 pages is too long to tell the story Against the Day has to tell, but maybe 1,084 pages is just right. Who can say? With long novels readerly endurance is an obvious concern, but Day seems to be more than Pynchon could handle. The novel is poorly copyedited: there are misplaced commas, subjunctive tense errors, and large chunks of awkward writing that don't seem germane to Pynchon's stylistic intent.
Then there's the whole problem of what used to be called the systems novel, but is now better known as hysterical realism, James Wood's term for novels jammed full of recondite details but lacking in well-drawn characters. It's fashionable to deride this kind of fiction, but a large quantity of detail is one of the hallmarks of the novel. Besides, Roland Barthes said our reading is driven by the "passion for meaning," and part of the pleasure of reading big novels is seeing how bits of meaning get integrated into larger wholes. Take, for instance, Balzac, the nineteenth-century realist Pynchon most resembles. Balzac created great junk piles of novels that eventually cohered into well-formed narratives. The hero of Le Pere Goriot, Eugene de Rastignac, swoons with desire upon his first glimpse of Parisian society. He says to himself, "To be young, to have a thirst for society, to be hungry for a woman, and to see two houses open to oneself!" His almost erotic interest in the frivolities of Parisian society gets mapped onto larger thematic concerns, in this case a Christian arch-drama of temptation. He triumphs over temptation and achieves a measure of autonomy by successfully negotiating the perils of sexual and financial power.
Despite its large themes and prolix details, Eugene's story is a recognizably human drama. The drama of a Pynchon novel lies within the interplay of theme and detail. It's terribly old-fashioned to insist on a character-centered theme, and for me the ethics of reading require being open to contemporary forms, even when they offer scant solace, as Pynchon offers. But there's the practical matter of maintaining the passion for meaning over an inordinate length of time when you already know, this being Pynchon, that the pleasure of the worldly details getting integrated into larger wholes will be denied. How long can we sustain our readerly performance, to cite Barthes again, in someone else's paranoid dream of annihilation?
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