About a week ago Cormac McCarthy, surprisingly promoting the new film adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, did an interview with John Jurgensen for the Wall Street Journal. Entitled “Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy,” Jurgensen questions McCarthy about the post-apocalyptic novel, the difference between a novel and film, and the role having a young child plays in the author’s creative process. What I found most interesting about the interview, however, is McCarthy’s opinion of longer novels in the face of modern readers:

WSJ: Does this issue of length apply to books, too? Is a 1,000-page book somehow too much?

CM: For modern readers, yeah. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

I was a bit taken aback by this idea. I find as I get older I am more interested in reading longer novels and find many shorter novels I read, and short stories for that matter, to be woefully underdeveloped and lacking. That’s not to say this is the case for all shorter works, and maybe this is one of the reasons the novella is coming back, but do modern readers have such an awful attention span that the 1000 page novel is dead? Is this just a bitter McCarthy bemoaning the state of readership because his longer novels were barely noticed by the general public but his very short and most recent novel won the Pulitzer? I really don’t know what to think. Have we as a culture gotten so dulled by the immediacy that technology has brought us, we no longer have the attention to absorb longer works? Maybe we’re too busy playing with our smartphones to look up and read something that takes a little time.

I’m inclined to think McCarthy is wrong. I think the more appropriate way to look at it is that it’s harder to publish such long novels due to all the money involved; it’s more expensive to publish a 1000 page book and if the perception is that readers won’t read it, no publisher will take a chance. However, with e-readers gaining prominence the cost barrier will no longer be an issue. Will we see epic novels making a comeback? Did they ever go away? What’s so prohibitive or daunting about 1000 pages?

I was quite pleased and excited to see that Bonnie  Jo Campbell, an alumna of my MFA program and Kalamazoo literary celebrity whom I interviewed for this blog, was nominated for the National Book Award this year for her collection of short stories, American Salvage. It was interesting to see her nomination announced on one of my favorite blogs, Jezebel, via this short post, “Nine Female Authors Finalists for National Book Awards”. That means almost half of the nominees are women, which is supposedly pretty good. Of course, we all know there are more male winners of major awards like the Pulitzer Prize and the Booker, but I wondered about the ratio of men to women nominees and winners for the National Book Award.  As a feminist whose sexism detector is always on fairly high alert, writing is one area of my life where I think about sexism the least. I read men and women equally without discrimination, and I don’t think my gender has anything to do with whether I am chosen for publication or accepted into a writer’s conference.  At all. But it is interesting to see that although there are just as many female aspiring writers, more men end up winning big prizes later in their careers.

In my very non-scientific study during a bout of writer’s block, I decided to take a look at the nominees and winners of the National Book Awards over the last 20 years, focusing only on fiction. From 1989 to 2008, there have been 45 female nominees and 55 male nominees–while women are still behind, it is certainly not by a huge margin. But in this same time, there have been 13 male winners and only seven female winners.  That’s almost twice as many men as women. In fact, the last female winner was Lily Tuck for her novel, The News From Paraguay, which took the award in 2004, a year when all the nominees were women. Since that year, things  have been going downhill somewhat; between 2005 and 2008, there were six female nominees, 14 male ones, and not a single female winner.

It’s interesting to see how these awards parallel women’s progress in many other areas of life. Though more women cook than men, there are still more male top chefs. Though more women ride horses than men, there are still slightly more men winning medals in the Olympics. Etc., etc.

An author’s gender has little to do with the experience I have with his or her book and obviously I am sure that the well-respected judges of the major book awards feel the same way.  But you can’t  help but wonder if sexism plays some kind of part when a beautiful book like Home by Marilynne Robinson, with its somewhat “domestic” subject matter, loses last year’s award to Shadow Country, by Peter Matthiessen, a book which explores the life and violent death of outlaw E.J. Watson, much more “masculine” subject matter.  In 20 years, it will be interesting to look back at the National Book Awards to see if the ratios have changed somewhat, or if women are still in close second.