March of the megabooks: it's all Donna Tartt's fault

Last week, backstage at the Auckland book festival, I expressed the mild view that The Goldfinch would be a vastly better novel if it lost 200 pages. And when I said 200, I obviously meant 300; I was just being polite. Someone asked if I would ever read The Luminaries, which is even longer. I explained that I’ve read it three times, because I was on the Man Booker panel the year it won. Even then, it wasn’t the longest novel submitted: that was The Kills by Richard House, which is, I think, the longest novel I have ever read at 1,004 pages long.

So I’m not sure why the book world has suddenly decided to call 2015 the year of the long novel: Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (992 pages) came out in 2010, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest 14 years before that. Perhaps it’s a marketing tool, aimed at uniting such disparate titles as Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (736 pages), about the lives of four contemporary New Yorkers, and Stephen Jarvis’s Death and Mr Pickwick, whose page-count (816) matches that of The Pickwick Papers, the book whose creation it commemorates. I am tempted by both titles, but I will be holding off for the ebook versions, to preserve my already distorted spine.

I don’t fear the long novel as much as pine for good editors. A book can be any length, if the words earn their keep on the page. I rarely see the point in huge chunks of prose that don’t serve the story: writing has to be mesmerisingly good before that doesn’t feel self-indulgent to me. I also worry that we might be overlooking short novels. The Luminaries might have been the longest-ever winner, but 2013’s prize also contained one of the shortest to be shortlisted: The Testament of Mary, by Colm Toibin, barely 100 pages long. As with everything Toibin writes, every word was cast carefully and precisely as though it were a poem. And the most beautiful book I read last year was The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono. Even with woodcut illustrations, it is only 46 pages long. But it gleams on my shelf, a bright berry amid huge branches.