MAKING BOOKS; They're Bigger. But Better? (original) (raw)
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MAKING BOOKS
- Oct. 28, 1999
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October 28, 1999
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Section E, Page
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It is my intention to inveigh against what seems to be the gradual (continuing?) publishing practice of making books that are so fat and windy that they sit, with some exceptions, like hefty neglected lumps on the shelves waiting for the first clever marketer to include a backpack with their purchase. In a world where everything else, excepting movies, is getting leaner and faster and miniaturized, there is little question that books appear to be going in the other direction. Perhaps it's just perception, and therefore unfair, but look at that bookcase in front of you and you'll sense that the pursuit of knowledge, information and pleasure that are the occasions for reading has become looming.
How many of these plump sentinels, even when purchased, stand unread or at best only skimmed? Of course, there have always been long, even very long, books and in certain masterly hands these sometimes don't seem long enough. Such books are not hard to find. ''War and Peace'' and ''Anna Karenina'' are cliched examples of the lengthy and wondrous, but those were by Tolstoy, who wrote in a different dimension from nearly any other novelist. Back in this realm, Robert Caro's ''Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York'' (Knopf, 1974), the 1,246-page biography of the legendary city planner, is still selling.
Now everyone is a movie critic, and the general criticism seems to be that movies are too long, that nearly three hours in the dark has become all too frequent and fidget-manufacturing, while the especially long film used to be, because of its rarity, a creatively moving experience. So every moviegoer has an arbitrary amount that can be cut from a film: 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes.
But can a reader make the same sweeping critique? Will a book be better if it's 100 or 200 pages shorter or will it seem incomplete? How many mammoth books are published each year that are bought but never read? These questions come up mostly in discussing biographies, particularly literary biographies, but no nonfiction genre is immune. Nor are novels.
Last spring Avon Books published Neal Stephenson's ''Cryptonomicon,'' which was 918 pages long and weighed in at 3 pounds 5 ounces, was two inches thick and had a jacket price of $27.50. It was on the best-seller list of The New York Times for three weeks; perhaps a two-and-a-half pounder would have stuck around longer.
In nonfiction, Knopf is publishing Nicholas Fox Weber's two-inch thick ''Balthus,'' the biography of an interesting but relatively unimportant artist, at 644 pages. It's likely that 400 pages could easily cover the elderly painter's life and artistic fascination with young girls. Another contender for the barbell-weight tome of the year award is Fred Kaplan's biography of Gore Vidal (Doubleday), at 850 pages. But Mr. Vidal could easily live long enough and cause some new literary mischief to warrant, by this measure of publishing indulgence, at least 1,000 pages in a subsequent edition. Or, as his editor, William Thomas, editor in chief of Doubleday, said: ''Gore's already lived three or four lives, in different arenas: the literary, the political, the cultural wars, Hollywood. He's been influential and provocative.'' Mr. Thomas said the first printing was about 32,000 copies, which is quite a large number for a book of this bulk.
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