Ticknor: On the Pleasures of the Short Novel

It's Ticknor week here at LBC—a five-day dialogue/celebration of Sheila Heti's wonderful novel about a disappointed biographer. Today though Wednesday El Sarvas and I will be talking about what we loved about the book, and inviting your comments. Dan Green may stop by to offer his thoughts as well. Thursday you'll get Dan Wickett's interview with the author, and on Friday, for you loyal Segundonites, Ed Champion will have an audio interview with Ms. Heti. I guess you kids call that a podcast.

Poor Ticknor, with his wilted flowers and his rain-soaked pie! I have friends like that. I am friends like that. But never mind.

If you cast your mind back to October, you may recall an interesting little comment thread on the subject of re-reading novels. In response to my remark about re-reading Maps for Lost Lovers, commenter Mike kindly reminded me that not only did some people not re-read novels, they couldn't understand why anyone else would. I thought of this recently because there's a passage from Ticknor I've read with delight a dozen times already, and probably will read a dozen more.

Here's the set-up: Biographer George Ticknor is on his way to a party, as happens several times in the book, and it's raining, as it always is, and he lacks an umbrella, which he always does, and he's late, which he always is. He's holding the aforementioned pie, which is looking rather sad, and as he walks he thinks about the shame and disapproval he has in store when he arrives at the party "smelling like a wet dog," holding his destroyed pie.

Here's the cool part: for a moment, he has a little flight of fancy, imagining how he might be received in a world where his friends love him and care for him:

I have a pie. It's a little ruined, I laugh, but come—and we hurry into the kitchen together, bumping legs in front of the stove, laughing as she pours me a glass of wine, then back to the large and warm dining room with several people, ten, seven, seventeen, sitting all around it, but two seats reserved for us, me putting my drink at my plate, beside hers, and I return mugging to the kitchen once more with Claire, her shooing me out, then back to the table with Prescott's announcement and how he read the article I published and a toast! The woman's eyes are glowing beside me as I shrug modestly and let it go, shrug it off with one quick line and a wink, and then take half the glass in one gulp robustly, then the roast, then the potatoes passed around—and the sister beside me is bumping her arm into mine, she's left-handed, embarrassed about that, and I show her that I too can eat with my left hand and she laughs, the tears disappearing from her eyes.

Soon, though, he falls back to reality:

You think I'm terrible, but I tried my best. I'm sorry. So sorry. So sorry I am late. Please forgive me. Oh but wasn't it to start at ten? I thought you said ten! I thought you said ten. Put the pie in the flower bed. Leave now.

That just kills me.

One of the things I love about a short novel—Ticknor is 118 pages, around 40,000 words—is that it's possible to hold the entire book in your mind, and remember and revisit passages like this when you've finished the book. In a longer novel, it seems to me, one pleasure is quickly replaced by the next, and you (or at least I) quickly forget little touches like how Mrs. Gamp says "dispoged" instead of "disposed," and the ex-artilleryman Bagnet has named his daughters "Malta" and "Quebec" after military bases where he has been stationed. Long novels work by accumulation of detail; short novels by subtraction. I don't think it's a stretch to say that short novels can achieve a kind of perfection that long novels cannot. It's probably no accident that the book that repeatedly comes up on surveys as the greatest American novel, The Great Gatsby, is only 50,000 words long.

On the other hand, surveys also tell us that readers of fiction favor long novels, and sales figures show that long novels sell better. Maybe people are long-novel lovers or short-novel lovers, just like they're either readers or re-readers. Mark, I think I can guess which side you're on. What about everybody else?

Comments

[Kirk]

An interesting thought... I tend to like long novels, because I read pretty fast (not speed reading, but fast anyway). Short novels often go by in less than an evening, and that's too little time, except, perhaps, for mysteries.

However, I've recently started appreciating shorter novels, though not because I want to re-read them, but rather because I see them as long short stories. I read Goodbye, Columbus the other night, and found it interesting to read an entire "work" in the time it would take to watch a movie. Perhaps it's movies that influence me? I certainly am more than hesitant about committing myself to 4-hour movies.

Anyway, back to Letting Go (this ones' over 600 pages), later in the same Library of America volume of Philip Roth...

[Anne]

They are two distinct pleasures, aren't they? I'm a slow reader and it's fun to live in the world of a long book for days--or weeks, embarrassingly enoug--at at time.

But a short book like Ticknor is a great pleasure, too for all those "you can hold it in your head" reasons. Also, because, dull Yankee that I am, I get that satisfaction of adding another book to my (imaginary) "read that" list.

What I want to know is this: did men really bring pies to dinner parties in antebellum Boston?

[Sam]

Kirk, you remind me of another dimension to this topic: short-book authors vs long-book authors. I'd venture to say that most authors go one way or the other. Toussaint, for example, has written four or five novels over 10 years, none more than 200 pages in length. By contrast, I'd be greatly surprised if we ever see a sub-200 David Mitchell novel. Roth is an exception. Bellow, now that I think if it, was an exception too, though his short books came only early and late in his career.

Anne, I'm definitely with you on the pleasures of "inhabiting" a novel for days or weeks at a time. Johnson famously said about Milton's long poem Paradise Lost, "No one ever wished it longer," but often at the end a good long novel I am sorry to see it end. Just because I've become so engaged with the characters and the time and the atmosphere of the book, I hate to become simple me again.

About pies, I don't know. I take it from Ticknor's comment "if the pie had been ready sooner" that he baked it himself, which is even odder and sadder, in a way.

Not that I haven't baked a pie or two myself.

[Kirk]

Toussaint is published in France by Les Editions du Minuit, who, interestingly enough, rarely publishes long novels. (There have been a few execptions, such as Claude Simon's Les Géorgiques, if I'm not mistaken, but not many.) Jean Rouaud's novels are mid-length, but most of their authors do write short, starting back in the days of the nouveau roman. Could this be that they only publish short works, or that "short" authors are attracted to them for other reasons?

Looking through my collection, none of my Minuit books are long; the longest being, perhaps, the Beckett novels. All the others are short. This, of course, may mean nothing, but is merely an observation...

[Pete]

I'm a slow reader, and with most of my non-reading spare time being devoted to my family and my own writing, I'm definitely biased towards shorter novels. 300 pages is about the ideal. Once I start getting beyond 400 pages my mind starts to drift, no matter how good the narrative is. (And, no, I've never been diagnosed with ADD.)

As for re-reading, my fave is Knut Hamsun's "Hunger", which I've read at least ten times. The language is spare but vivid, and every time I catch something I never noticed before. I doubt I would have read this great book more than once if it was 400-500 pages.

[Condalmo]

The more pleasurable the short novel, the more I wish it was a longer novel. I usually prefer the short story for those small spaces (made small by life's other responsibilities) - something I can squeeze in. Otherwise, someone get me a "Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" or similarly long, fantastic book.

[Sam]

Kirk, you are tempting me into territory I've been saving for our Toussaint discussion in a couple of weeks. I hope you can come back for that, as one of the rare people I've encountered who've read JPT.

I never considered the fact that most Minuit books are short, although now that you draw it to my attention I realize that I must have picked up on that somehow, since I have til now misread Minuit as "small" rather than what it really means, which is "midnight." (Walker Percy has a great essay on similar blunders, which is called "Metaphor as Mistake.")

Pete, you remind me that Hamsun is another writer who went both long (Victoria) and short (Growth of the Soil).

Condalmo -- and I mean this in the nicest possible way -- you're such a freakin' guy! You remind us all that gender probably has a role here too. At a minimum, there is a particular kind of big book that appeals to guys more than women.

[Kirk]

Yes, Minuit is midnight - Midnight Editions, would be the translation.

I have lived in France for more than 20 years (though I'm a native New Yorker), and worked as a bookseller for 3 of them, so know Minuit's production very well. I am also a big fan of Beckett and Pinget, and have all their books.

As for Toussaint, I read one many years ago (perhaps the first) and it didn't move me. But I may pick up this one and join in the discussion when you get around to it.

[Sam]

Pinget I have not read. Modiano is my recent obsession. Re Toussaint, the first was "Monsieur." I think it's his only novel written in the third person, which gives it a different feel from the later books. Still my favorite, in fact.

[Kirk]

Yes, Monsieur is the one I read. It was made into a movie at some point.

Pinget was a genius. He was very close to Beckett - both socially and artistically - but his work is much more humanist. I first discovered his novels in English translation, published by Red Dust (I wonder if they still exist...), then when I came to France, read everything he wrote. An amazing body of work, one that takes place in an imaginary area, with some characters and events that re-occur.

It is pure nouveau roman, though - some of his works, especially the early ones, are almost didactic, as though attempting to posit a specific style of writing. But later works are warm and humorous. Definitely worth reading.

[Sam]

Just noticed that Dalkey Archive in the States has three Pingets in their catalog:

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/backlist/pinget.html

Off to get some Pinget. Thanks for the recommend, Kirk.

[Kirk]

The Inquisitory is Pinget's longest novel. It is, as the description says, a question/answer story, about a crime that you never really figure out. If you've ever seen Peter Greenaway's early film The Birds, I think the latter was influenced by this book.

Mahu is closer to Beckett's Murphy, with the same kind of humor. And Trio has three very good short works, which may, in fact, be a better intro to Pinget's work overall. Passacaglia is an especially fine short work.

Enjoy! I'm happy to have helped someone discover Pinget, who is pretty much unknown in English, in spite of a handful of translations. He is one author I would love to translate myself, but, as you know, most US publishers aren't even interested in translations any more... Sigh.

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