random books / long books (1 Viewer)

I just finished 'Frog' by Stephen Dixon.

That's the longest Dixon book. Well, there's Interstate.

He's more regarded as a short fiction writer.

Clocks in at 769 pages.

Not the usual American po-mo dick-stroking business. Not po-mo, but perhaps lumped in with U.S left-of-field fiction out of convenience for publishers and reviewers alike.

If I was to glibly write a soundbite for Frog, I might write, "Imagine George Costanza trapped in the mind of a vaguely experimental, yet formally committed, American novel being pinged around by his own shallow urges and hyperactive, juvenile imagination."

Readability was high for me. It drags you along. Most of it is pretty manageable switching between interiority, in-the-moment reflecting on what he just said/thought, with pages on end of dialogue interchanges mostly in one never-ending block with no paragraph breaks.

The clincher is whether you will find it funny. He builds in his own shortcomings as a writer and has a serious fetish for typos. It can be tedious, though I feel that's all part of what he's trying to do in this particular novel.

But there are no dense descriptive passages or utterly "drop your weapons" ornery prose you might get in some American stuff.
 
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Middlemarch is a great long book. I'm not sure I'll read a better English novel. It's one I intend to revisit throughout the rest of my life.

I know it's all about country life in early 1830's England, but George Eliot really set the standard for novels.
 
How long is Middlemarch?

I remember being shocked at how into Silas Marner (which is not that long) I got as a teenager but i've never revisited her stuff. I defo should.
 
I think it worked as an antidode to whatever was on the leaving cert for me. My brother must have done it for his leaving because there's no way my house would just have a 19th century classic knocking about.
 
How long is Middlemarch?

I remember being shocked at how into Silas Marner (which is not that long) I got as a teenager but i've never revisited her stuff. I defo should.
It's about 800/900 pages long.

When I was younger I thought it was just one of those English 19th Century novels - which it is, but it's also not.
Basically Eliot has as much in common with Proust or Flaubert than she does with Dickens or Thackeray.
When she wrote it, she was considered the greatest novelist working in the English language at the time.

She's a fascinating person and I think she was well ahead of her time.

There's nothing especially dramatic in Middlemarch. It's all about relationships and country life. Eliot weaves about six stories in to one: it's a magnificent "state of the nation" novel. I read somewhere that Eliot had a limited amount of paper to write on, so she treated each page carefully. It's like every line has been thoroughly thought through. The pacing of the chapters is perfect and the way she moves from a philosophical musing to a real-life encounter is done brilliantly, and effortlessly. Most of all, Eliot is very considerate about her readers - it's clear she's written something with the average reader (of her day) in mind.

Basically... it's the gold standard of novels. Of course there are many others which play with the novel format and do very clever things - and there are lots of fantastic novels which precede it, but Middlemarch is the standard.
 
Just finished Norman Mailer's 'true life novel' The Executioner's Song, published in 1979 which clocks in at 1,050 pages.

I read a third of this for a seminar called The American Way of Death years ago in NUI Galway, so it was always nagging me to go back and finish it.

The novel is shaped out of transcripted interviews* with a cast of over a hundred voices. The first half of the novel is one of the best sustained pieces of modern literature I've come across. The second half is arguably better again except the final 100 pages get really bogged down with lawyering, lobbying and there's just too many lawyers on both sides and it becomes a barrage of names in places. Also at that point, the narrative is stick in this rut where the it flicks between execution to stay of execution and back and forth.

For a long book, it's pretty easy to read with some amazing framing of scenes and endlessly beautiful pockets of writing, delicious dialogue... and did I mention the framing? Mailer effortlessly doing the whole free indirect discourse like the pro that he is, building this absurd, tragic American gothic in a very fine, discreet manner. It goes from cracking you up to stunning you with short brutal blasts in the space of a few lines.



First long book I read this far!

*"It is safe to say that the collected transcript of every last recorded bit of talk would approach fifteen thousand pages."
 

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