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?

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