A Five-Course Meal: My Love Affair with Long-Winded Novels

By now, it should be clear that I am about as obsessed with food as I am with books. Fast food, comfort food, gourmet food: somehow these metaphors creep into my discussions of books quite unconsciously.   Now I feel compelled to go with another metaphor to describe my obsession with long novels, and I feel that the "five-course meal" is an apt description of how I think about the process of reading a mammoth, complicated, and brilliantly imagined novel.

Twenty-first century Americans typically avoid books that are "too long" and unwieldy.  But then again, we also expect to be served our meals in an efficient fashion and rarely linger over our meals - tasting and absorbing several courses of delicious foods, as do many Europeans.  We also have so many other competing demands on our entertainment time: movies, ipads, mobile phones, ipods, tv - the list goes on.   As some experts have suggested, it may be that our attention span is shortened by the types of media we absorb, which provide in rapid-fire fashion news and other informational items for our consumption, as in the Facebook  newsfeeds, which I also confess to relish.   Nineteenth-century individuals had fewer forms of entertainment, so they - at least the literate - appear to have had more time to linger over a long and complicated narrative.  Think of the novels they read by long-winded authors like Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope [more about these authors later].  Of course, there are class dimensions to this phenomenon as well.  Many who had the time were also those whose time had been bought by earlier generations of nobility and merchants.  We now have many more literate Americans, and books are still part of the culture, as the preponderance of book clubs and book stores testify.  But the classics and other long-winded novels are not in vogue.  Let me make a pitch, then, for the long-winded novel.

Good long-winded novels are typically intricately plotted and contain lots of characters and details about the environments in which the characters exist. Although it may take a bit more time to enter into the narrative of a long-winded novel,  once you are embedded, you have a book that you can turn to again and again.  Sometimes you become so caught up with the intrigue and characters of the novel that you can barely pay attention to daily life.  The books constitute a universe in and of themselves, not only sketching in details about time and place, but inhabiting these places with characters whose lives and reflections shed light on the big social questions facing their communities.   Typically, the best such books cause the reader to reflect on profound questions regarding social change, religion, science, money, love, and redemption.

One of the finest twentieth-century novels I have read is called A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, and it is a masterpiece and compulsively readable.  It is a hefty read, at 600 plus pages.  You don't have to be into high culture to enjoy this book, as I have heard from folks from many walks of life about the profound effect this book has had on them.   The novel is epochal in scope. Set in the context of India during the Indira Ghandi era [1970s], it illuminates on a very intimate scale how Ghandi's reforms, termed "the Emergency," aimed at "cleaning up the slums" affects several individuals who make their way to the city to find work only to endure the most painful of losses.  We wander with these men as they move from their hometowns to Mumbai, start with high hopes and settle for an existence that is almost unimaginable.  Along the way, there are many plot twists, reflections on the political situation facing the city through the lens of some of its poorest inhabitants, and many points of human connection. The three men, and the woman who employs them, find community among themselves. They learn to find a "fine balance between hope and despair."  With artfulness and wisdom Mistry portrays the humanity of those who are living amidst the most dire of circumstances.  The book is worthy of your time and, like a five-course meal, is to be savored.  The ending, however, painful, is exquisitely wrought, leaving you with an image of humanity that you are unlikely to forget.  Whether the novel takes you a week, a month, or even months to read, you will never regret the time that you have spent with it.