Slate's Meghan O'Rouke, in light of the recent NY Times list of the best novels of the last 25 years, which is heavy with large sprawling novels--sings the praises of the "small" novel:
What's been lost in the conflation of "small" and "small-minded" is the recognition that small books can be powerful vehicles for big ideas—to say nothing of powerful examples of aesthetic rigor. In his otherwise astute essay accompanying the Times' list, A.O. Scott succumbed to a form of category confusion when he explained the absence of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried in the top five by noting that they are "small" books that do not "generalize" but "document"— a peculiar misreading of both novels, which hardly shy away from probing large themes, and do so with metaphoric richness. In fact, plenty of big novels do far more documenting than these two masterpieces.This odd assertion—emblematic of the broader cultural confusion—raises a question that no one seems to have a satisfying answer to: What exactly makes a novel small, aside from its length? And if we don't know, is the term more of an obstacle than an aid in taking stock of great literature? The Great Gatsby, after all, might seem to be a small book: It is a novel of "lyric incisiveness," as Claudia Roth-Pierpont has put it, and deals with a small group of characters over a relatively short period of time. The narrative is a single thread, filtered through Nick Carraway's narration, rather than the intricate crosscutting—a la Underworld or The Corrections—that characterizes "big" novels. Clearly, part of what makes Gatsby seem big in our eyes today is that it frames its tale as a purposeful meditation on the American dream, and its propulsive last page explicitly deals with the tension between nostalgia for and disenchantment with our past's promise of an innocent future.
Being termed "small," it seems, is a verdict on whether a book is familiarly "American." It reflects a perceived failure to pursue explicitly enough, in formal or thematic terms, our representative narratives of money, regret, ambition, and individual struggle in the messy maelstrom of contemporary social reality. Would Rabbit Run (272 pages), we may wonder, have been called a small novel if it had shown up on its own (rather than in an edition of the Rabbit series) among the top five selected? Perhaps not, because it tells a story we've already accepted as somehow American: the spiritual quest of a man trying to break free from the normalizing bonds of marriage and the expectations of material success. But if Rabbit Run opened with a bored housewife in a remote town, rather than with a former star athlete playing basketball, would it suddenly seem small?
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