Sagging middle: Too-long novels are losing the plot

Many excessively long novels lose momentum in the middle. (Photo by Karolina Grabowska via Pexels)

The story goes that when Abraham Lincoln was asked how long a person’s legs should be, he replied: “Long enough to reach the ground.” It’s the same with novels. They should be long enough to achieve their objectives and no more.

This commonsensical view is often ignored. One website that promises to “make your writing shine” claims that most publishers consider a novel’s length anywhere between 50,000 and 110,000 words and adds that the average length of an adult novel is about 90,000 words. Surely that’s too many.

The economics of publishing and printing may have something to do with word count, but that can’t be the only reason. Perhaps there’s satisfaction and seriousness – however misplaced – to be found in the sheer heft of a doorstopper. Or maybe writers and readers are living up to expectations that arose when Victorian serialized novels started to be published as triple-deckers, and then singly.

This is not to say that every novel should get to the point as soon as possible. Clearly, authors should be free to explore and navigate their concerns in a manner that best suits them. Nevertheless, there are many examples that show how this can be done without sacrificing pithiness.

Depending on your edition, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Albert Camus’s The Stranger and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep are all under 200 pages. Moreover, as Robert McCrum points out, “The novels of that great triumvirate – Waugh, Greene and Orwell – average 60-70,000 words apiece”.

Many excessively long novels lose momentum in the middle. That’s the fuzzy bit between the innovative opening and the satisfying conclusion. Typically, a sagging middle will over-extend the plot and make characters jump through needless hoops to get from Point A to Point B. The result, in Henry James’s words, is a “large, loose baggy monster”.

Craft classes are full of ways to fix sagging middles. Establish clear goals, they say. Raise the stakes. Throw some more obstacles in the characters’ paths. Sadly, few of them tell you to simply ditch the excess baggage and get on with it.

Granted, a reason that some prefer long novels is the pleasure of being immersed in a fictional world for an extended period. That’s certainly a delight. Such titles, though, are few and far between -- it’s not every day that you come across A Suitable Boy or Middlemarch. The Russians excelled at this, but then, their view of the role of literature in crafting a nation’s consciousness was more elevated than the one that prevails today.

SF and speculative novels also tend to be longer than those in other genres, simply because both novelists and readers take pleasure in lingering over the characteristics and characters of a world different from our own. Nevertheless, classics from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris are just over 200 pages, and no-one can deny their inventiveness.

Sometimes, it’s an authorial voice that makes reading a long novel worth it, never mind the plot. This unique point of view can be edifying, sardonic, or simply funny. Take Steve Toltz’s longer-than-usual A Fraction of the Whole, with its over-the-top stories and non-stop exuberance. Or, at double the length, Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks Newburyport, with its stylistic repetitions, social commentary and cutting satire.

On the other hand, it’s not that a short novel means sacrificing experimentation, style, or distinctiveness. Look at Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, or even Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Again, all of them are under 200 pages.

Much fiction translated into English is also in the form of exquisitely crafted short novels that don’t seem rushed but don’t sprain the wrists either. To take a few recent titles of note, there’s French author GauZ’s Standing Heavy, Catalan author Eva Baltasar’s Boulder, and Mexican author Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais. These are short, yes, but they’re as intricate and impactful as works that are twice the size.

Randall Jarrell once defined the novel as “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it”. All too often, it’s the elongation that’s at fault. Brevity is the soul of wit, as Polonius informed us, and it should be the soul of novels, too.