Came thru the block, everything that's new, sippin' that mf'in DS2.

In Defense of the Long Book

In an odd bit of synchronicity, I received a comment on a previous newsletter about prose and worldbuilding and dramatic conclusions just as I was preparing to write this one on how my reading tastes have changed, oriented more, now, towards the unconventional, the challenging, the transgressive (at least when it comes to the catechisms put in place to make writing more easily marketable).

As preamble, I came across two pieces recently extolling the virtues of long movies, the first from Richard Brody in The New Yorker and the second in The Guardian about, principally, Ari Aster’s latest, Beau Is Afraid. Personally, I find myself more inclined toward the Guardian piece than the sometimes stentorian tone of Brody’s, but that might also be due to a more inclusive cataloguing in Hassenger’s article. Brody mentions Gone with the Wind, a few works from Scorsese’s oeuvre, and name-checks some films and filmmakers you’re more likely to find on the Criterion Channel than any other streaming service. In this light, over-length-as-virtue is an endorsement of auteurism, of directorial hubris, the vision bursting open the cage constructed by producers or studios or, more generally, the Suits. It’s Art, dammit! But, as Hassenger points out, the latest John Wick (ART, DAMMIT!) clocks in at 169 minutes, so almost three hours long. RRR, my favorite movie from last year, sets the three-hour mark on fire and does a dance number on its ashes. Babylon and Avatar: Way of the Water, both theatrical experiences I greatly enjoyed and both, in their own ways, expressions of ambitions directorial visions flying in the face of things like “audience attention span” and whatnot, are longer than three hours. Brody mentions Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate as an overlong movie that was critically panned but states that such assessments were little more than “public assassination.” It’s in my queue¹ so hopefully I’ll get a chance to see for myself.² Though a number can’t exactly lie, movie length is subjectively experienced. 90-minute slogs and two-and-a-half-hour eye-blinks have both happened to me. While the vast majority of movies I’ve watched and do watch fall within that producer-ly desirable 90-120 minute window (I loved Bullet Train.), I can’t help but feel that it’s gotten easier to get away with something quantitatively other.

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My current read is The Recognitions by William Gaddis. I first saw a copy of it back in maybe 2010-11 on the bookshelf of a friend in South Williamsburg and though he was a specific individual, he was also a type, the type to have, weighing down that same shelf, tomes by Robert Musil and Gass and slimmer volumes from the likes of Sherwood Anderson. He’s the friend I borrowed Doctor Faustus from, as well as Tropic of Cancer and The Sea. I have him to thank for many, many luminous reading experiences, and I hope he won’t mind my having held onto his copy of The Savage Detectives all these years. My reading Gaddis now does have admittedly hipsterish vibes in that he’s got a reputation as “your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper.” He prefigures David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon. Jonathan Franzen famously wrote an essay about difficulty as a factor of the reading experience, his concerns orbiting none other than himself and Mr. Gaddis. In his taxonomy of Status novels and Contract novels, a schema predicated on how difficult and inaccessible the reader finds the text, The Recognitions proves to Franzen the Platonic Ideal of the Difficult Novel.³ A big part of that difficulty is the simple matter of its heft. My edition, not including the Introduction or the Afterword, runs at 933 pages.

Over the decades, I’d collected a number of long books, in part because their covers and their summaries were compelling enough, but they were more ornament than anything else. I would get to them eventually. At the end of every year, I would make a list of books I’d be determined to tackle once Jan. 1 rolled around, but every year, events intervened until finally I forced them to the top of my queue. One of them was Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (now a TV series on Netflix⁴). I remember ordering it in 2008 from a computer terminal in Dubrovnik during the course of senior thesis research on the growth of smuggling networks in the Balkans during the 90s. I was an international crime enthusiast at the time and a crime epic set in and about India was entirely my bag. It would take me more than a decade to eventually finish it. When I picked it back up in 2019, I found my bookmark lodged somewhere around pg. 238. I removed it, turned back to page 1 and, ready now, let myself be consumed. I picked up Robert Caro’s The Power Broker⁵ some time during law school but it wasn’t until the waning weeks of 2020 that I found myself blazing through that surprisingly smooth read. Infinite Jest, I read only after having been moved beyond words by The Pale King, which, to me, was actually the more difficult of the two books, given that its principle theme seemed to be how human beings dealt with boredom. This is to say nothing of the Russians. I don’t know that I can recommend War and Peace. I can only say that it’s one of the most emotionally capacious stories I’ve ever read. Only time Tolstoy outdid himself was with Anna Karenina.

Though the reasons may have changed over the years, I do find that my appreciation for gargantuan page counts has been a persistent feature in my life, poking its head onstage from the wings every now and then to give me a bit of stage direction. But the thing about The Recognitions is that it’s not only long; it’s supposed to be Difficult. I’m sure the other shoe will drop soon enough, but so far, admittedly only about 30+ pages in, the d-word that comes to mind is dazzling. The biggest question I have is how on Earth does he sustain this for 910 more pages?

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In the beginning, a large portion of what drew me to “difficult” books—books with over-extensive vocabulary or books with a flurry of porously-bounded points of view or books that interrupted the events of the story with historical or philosophical digressions, books that differed significantly from those that adhered more readily to the conventions of genre and audience expectation that results from the Möbius Strip of publishers thinking they know what an audience wants and audiences dictating to publishers via purchases that they want more (or less) of what publishers are giving them—was audacity. Back before I knew how gauche it was to wear one’s ambition on one’s sleeve,⁶ I read those esteemed “great” in an effort to learn how they got where they got and how I could get there myself. Like how supremely acclaimed painters learn their craft by copying the brushstrokes of those masters that came before them. But whenever I would get to the book itself, I would find myself so shook, so dazzled, as to have forgotten my original mission. I couldn’t read Absalom, Absalom! without any attendant dying to self. I don’t believe I’ve met the soul who has come out the other end of Dhalgren, believing, no matter what they thought going in, that this was a thing that could be replicated. I remember going into Underworld wanting to see what all the fuss was about after having been rather nonplussed by White Noise and halfway through that initial “Pafko at the Wall” sequence, I was like “damn, n—-, chill!” There was a bit of cart-before-the-horse at work, clearly. Rather than let a story dictate its length to me, I told myself I wanted to write a Big Book and went from there. And, of course, ambitions change, circumstances change, and while I’ll not say that my youthful moxie has been whittled away, I won’t say that that’s not what has happened. But why then am I returning now, in my reading (and writing) habits, to the siren song of the Big Novel? Why, when there are plenty of commercially accessible sub-400 page books to read and write? Books that can be good—tremendous, even—in their own right! I think it might have something to do not with me as a storyteller, but, in fact, with me as gamer.

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I used to think that whatever it was that happened to me when I emerged from the cauldron that was Sekiro in 2019 was confined to my gaming habits. I’d return to that hurt locker on three more occasions and, perversely, famously, it would mark my first Platinum Trophy. Since then, I’ve found myself over and over seeking out difficult games (hi, Elden Ring) and even difficult bosses in “regular” games (hi, Gná; hello, King Hrolf). Why did I become so enamored of Sifu? So enamored of doing all the things in Sifu? Why go back to Elden Ring? Why tf go back to MALENIA?!⁷ That had nothing to do with any interest in how games are made, how boss AI is constructed, her lore and how it’s expressed in her combat mechanics. I wanted to play the shit outta that boss fight.

And I think I want to read the shit out of The Recognitions.

There’s a titanic sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing a long (and difficult) thing. I’ve felt that in games, and I’ve felt that a few times already this year with books. Getting to the end of The Kindly Ones and, before that, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was a headrush.⁸ But in the midst of those books, there was plenty of magic. Maybe a Git Gud imperative brought me to them, but the water pouring from me after my baptism didn’t feel like evidence of virtue so much as evidence of blessing. I enjoyed those books. Greatly.

And I’ve my heart set on enjoying The Recognitions.

It goes almost without saying (and I’ve said it in different form above) that long does not equal difficult. Sure some books can be both.⁹ I couldn't tell you what Petersburg by Andrei Bely was about, though my local library has it at 356 pages. Conversely, I’m a perilously slow reader, but The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan was both the Philosopher’s Stone in making me someone who wanted to write professionally as well as a week’s work. Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor was one of the toughest books to get through (not only due to its violence but also the fact that paragraphs would persist for pages); however, Les Misérables was the pleasant-est of strolls through that era of French history.¹⁰ So while long and difficult tend to overlap,¹¹ they shouldn't be taken as synonymous.¹² Blood Meridian is less than half the length of The Priory of the Orange Tree.

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One thing I think getting older has done to me is slow me down. Or, at least, make increasingly evident to me the virtues of slowing down. Sure, it sucks that I take longer getting out of bed, but it’s pretty cool that I take longer in forming an opinion about a thing as well. Mom would be proud of that last. Being “quick to anger” is generally frowned upon in the Bible. A side-effect is that I’ve been opened up in a sense; stuff that used to be too bitter on the tongue is now worth trying out, worth savoring even, if I can manage not to eat it too quickly. Even though I was fighting Malenia for the second time, it still took me a little over 4 hours to beat her. FromSoft games teach you nothing if not patience. So I find myself increasingly amenable to the philosophical discursion, to the overly-ornate sentence, to the rococo plot-architecture.¹³

Franzen, in his essay, talks a bit about the Contract model of literature (as opposed to the Status model), defined principally by what’s commonly understood as the reader-writer contract, predicated on the delivery of a pleasurable reader experience. Audience, appeal, all that jazz. Normally, this would mean genre conventions, reader expectations, stuff like that. But I think something’s missing. Assuming so stark a divide between the Status model and the Contract model (while admitting overlap for books like Pride and Prejudice), that sympathetic characters and capacious postwar cultural critique stand on two opposite ends of a burnt bridge, is to cut off access to a whole other realm of pleasure. The head-high of conquering a “difficult” thing is, in my opinion, the most socially-acceptable narcotic experience in which I’ve ever partaken. It’s also the kindest on my body.

I will say, though, that I’m exceedingly glad not every novel is a Difficult novel. That’s part of what makes them special. If everything that came out on shelves was a thousand pages, 50-100 of which were endnotes, that might suggest its own poverty of imagination. (We’d certainly be a different society were it ever possible to build a literary biome out of 1000-page postmodern texts critiquing Systems.) But I’ve read slim adventure novellas, I’ve read conventional mysteries, I’ve read austere, astringent autofiction, and I’ve written a few of those things. I’d like very much to try my hand at something different. Something long, something difficult, something I can put next to those other books that fit the bill and look at with recognition.¹⁴

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The more art I consume, the more I appreciate artistic indulgence. Babylon struck me as a wildly indulgent movie, but I loved it for that. Though Kanye has for a long time been and is currently persona non grata, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is one of the most indulgent and magisterial pieces of music I’ve ever listened to. I’ve grown to love the artistic artifact that is filled to bursting with a vision even if that vision is imperfectly realized. It sings transgression and my body thrills to that. There’s a feeling of having gotten away with something. Scorsese got away with The Irishman (well, because he’s Scorsese and he’d already given us Raging Bull, The Wolf of Wall Street, Mean Streets, The Departed, even!). Christopher Nolan gets away with his movies. I don’t know a more fundamentally audacious book than A Brief History of Seven Killings! It all has the feel of a 9-minute guitar solo. I find now that that’s the thing I wanna do. Those other trappings of greatness, childish things to be put away. But what must it feel like to hit the five-minute mark and to keep going, permission be damned?

These folks get away with this stuff in part, I think, because they’ve proven to the people who experience their work that they’re good at what they do. Masterful, in fact. A three-hour movie can be bad, whatever that means in your value judgment schema.¹⁵ But it’s the trying that I love. I got the impression after leaving Babylon that I and my cohort might have been in the minority, at least when we peeked outside our bubble of shared sensibility. But whew what an experience that movie was. Not everyone loves Succession the way not everyone is on Twitter, which is to say a lot of people do both those things but many who don't very aggressively do not.¹⁶

I love movies. That doesn’t just mean I want more movies. Sometimes it means I want that movie to be more of itself. I love books. That means I want more books. But it also means I want more book.

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A dear friend is reading The Brothers Karamazov for the first time right now, and it’s taking every bone in my body not to pester her with requests for a progress report. There’s one part in particular I can’t wait for her to get to. But we’ve joked about Big Book Summer specifically as well as our desire for challenge in general. Sometimes the expression of that desire carries with it the implication of scorn for everything else, valorization of the Status model implying that the Contract model is ecclesiastically lesser. But just because I’ve played Elden Ring more than I’ve played Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey doesn’t mean I judge the completion of one a more virtuous act than finishing the other.¹⁷

We live in difficult times and etc etc etc. Wanting comfort, wanting to have expectations fulfilled, wanting to glide along a still lake when so much is tempest around you, there is nothing ignoble about any of that. Only the morally illiterate would look at that and see vice. But it would be a titanic loss were the Big and Challenging stuff to be squeezed out.

The only advice I ever feel qualified to give young(er) writers has generally been “love writing,” because, of course, there’s so much business bullshit you’ll have to get through before you see your name on the spine of a volume in a Barnes & Noble, but I’m thinking I might have an addendum. Be audacious. Do the big, scary, dangerous thing. If nothing else, you’ll at least have that first draft.

When I was in film school, I had a note written somewhere—instruction from a professor, perhaps—that read “write small; the metaphors will graft themselves onto the text.” And that was useful to hear at the time. I was writing stuff for the stage that a director would have defenestrated me for. But there’s a time and a place for that kind of thing. The Old Man and the Sea isn’t the only book about dudes on water out there. There’s also the one about Ahab and Ishmael. I like that one more.

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Currently reading: The Recognitions - William Gaddis

Currently listening: Breakaway - In Hearts Wake

1. Shoutout once again to the Criterion Collection.

2. Re Cimino: The Deer Hunter fcking SLAPS!

3. He lists at one point several similarly difficult books that he, at the time of that writing, had yet to finish, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a certain level of pridefulness at seeing Moby-Dick, Doctor Faustus, and Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon featured, all books I devoured and consider favorites to this day. Indeed, in the barbershop conversation of Greatest American Novel (whatever that means), Moby-Dick is my Illmatic. I can commiserate with JF, though. It’ll be some time before I feel anything approaching the courage demanded of me to tackle Remembrance.

4. The current Writers Guild of America strike is the subject of a whole other newsletter, probably soon to come.

5. Not a novel, I know, but I’ve a point to make.

6. It’s amazing how quickly one discovers that Naruto telling everyone and their mom that he’s gonna be the next Hokage is not behavior to be emulated.

7. I plan on writing in greater detail about my last (last as in “final”) Elden Ring run, but a magical thing happened during that Malenia fight that resulted in me beating her with no armor on and I feel no compunctions whatsoever about bragging here.

8. Though the end of The Kindly Ones did feel, indeed, rushed.

9. See A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, my 2nd favorite book of all time after the 1000+ page The Count of Monte Cristo.

10. Pro-tip for prospective Les Mis readers: the book has exactly 365 chapters. On top of that, most of them are short enough that you can knock one out while you reheat your leftover stir fry. You’re welcome.

11. See Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.

12. See Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

13. Sure, I’ll read two pages on how bread is made in your world if the writing’s compelling enough.

14. I’m using future tense here like I’m not already 40k deep into exactly this kind of book, lol @ me.

15. Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor is the only example I can think of of a movie winning an Academy Award (for Best Sound Editing) and being nommed for half a dozen Golden Raspberries in the same year.

16. Another wildly indulgent piece of media! But oof does it slap!

17. Origins is my favorite.