Hello epic writers, writers of grand sagas, pursuers of the Great American novel, or the Great un-American novel!
This week we take on and unpack our thoughts on novel length, the very concept of The Great American Novel, advances, and more. Guest Garth Risk Hallberg joins us to talk about his own long works of fiction, as well as his writing process that involves seeing where his characters want to take him. We touch upon characterization vs. plot, the nature of long stories, and finding what motivates your characters in fiction. There’s a lot to take away from this episode, so tune in!
Big Novels for big reading experiences:
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
the Bible
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante
Partial transcript from the show
Grant: I’m Grant Faulkner, and I’m here with my co-host Brooke Warner, and, Brooke, I’m thinking about The Big Novel, the history of The Big Novel, the pleasures and the pains of The Big Novel, the experimental risk of The Big Novel, the challenges of actually carrying off The Big Novel, and that’s all because our guest, Garth Risk Hallberg, wrote a debut novel, City on Fire, a few years back that got a lot of attention because it was a big, long novel that smacked of ambition, so it was sometimes referred to as an attempt at the Great American Novel—a term that is both celebratory and damning at the same time, I find. I used to love reading big novels, and I used to love to try to write them, but I must confess that my immersion in flash fiction, which is an aesthetic that extends to the novel for me, captivates me to the extent that I don’t read too many long novels, and I certainly no longer aspire to write them. And just to out myself as a somewhat questionable or bad reader, I was recently at a friend’s house, and she was telling me all about this wonderful novel she’d just read, and I picked it up and said, “I’m afraid it’s much too long for me.” That’s kind of sad, isn’t it? But I just don’t have the time I used to have, and reading a long book takes a lot of patience and time, so I don’t read some books because they are too long and require too much of a commitment from me. What is your take on the long book, Brooke?
Brooke: So, I love the long book in a nostalgic kind of way, because all the big books I’ve read I read before becoming a mom. Some of my favorites: Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky; The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand; Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Don Quixote by Cervantes, Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Also, The Historian by Elisabeth Kostova. I can remember all of these because I immersed myself in many many hours of reading and so they stay with you in a different way. And it’s not just the stories, it’s also the feat of having read the books. It’s like a journey, but also like a conquest in the act of finishing the work. It’s very satisfying and I miss tackling those big books, but right now it’s just not something I can do. How about you Grant, are you like me that The Big Novels shaped you and are more a thing of your past, or have you gotten through some of these in more recent years?
Grant: Like you, Brooke, big reading experiences played a large part in my earlier reading. I’d think nothing of picking up a novel like Anna Karenina or The Grapes of Wrath or even Moby Dick. In fact, I loved Moby Dick when I read it as a 20-year-old with endless time in the world. I loved big, maximalist stories, and I loved the idea of writing one. In fact, my younger and much more arrogant and ambitious self had an idea of writing the Great American novel, and I wrote a couple of novels that were big, long thickets of a novel, full of criss-crossing layers and voices and time periods and characters—big in all ways, but I found that bigness didn’t really suit my storytelling style. Now, I really don’t think I have the energy to go so big, and I find a lot of power in the smaller stories, stories that are quieter and more intimate. I feel that it’s more challenging to achieve intimacy in a big novel, and I write and read for a sense of intimacy. I also have to say that I have several big books that have been on my bookshelves for literally decades now that I haven’t read. Infinite Jest comes to mind. Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is on my bucket list. I will be very sad if I don’t read Proust. I’d like to read the Bible. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I feel like each of these books will take a year to read. Literally. So I’m not sure if I can carry it off. Do you have any big books on your bucket list, Brooke?
Brooke: I do, yes. Grapes of Wrath is actually one of them. I’ve never read it and it would be quite tragic to never accomplish that. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño is on my list. Elena Ferrante’s The Neapolitan Novels is now a boxed set, and I’d very much love to tackle that. The set, which is four novels, is 1,700 pages. So those are the top three, though there are others. I should just start, maybe download the audiobook and get going. . . . How many hours could it be?—certainly, not longer than Barbara Streisand’s memoir.
Grant: Ferrante’s Neapolotian Novels are probably the last big book I read, and they were worth it. Bolano’s 2666 is on my bookshelf, I own it, and I should perhaps shelve it next to Infinite Jest. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll make a comeback with big novels. I did a bit of research on the notion of the Great American Novel, and there is some interesting history to it. The notion of the Great American Novel was actually coined by a now long-forgotten writer, John William De Forest, in an 1868 essay. De Forest saw the Great American Novel serving as a “tableau” of American society, and said that the novel would “paint the American soul” and capture “the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” I think what’s interesting is that the idea for the Great American Novel coincided with the whole idea of manifest destiny and the nation’s development, or it’s born out of that. I think one factor was that American artists were in a position of insecurity compared to the European artists they compared themselves to, so the Great American Novel was a way to lay claim to this fairly new artistic form and give it bigness and uniquely American traits. I don’t know of another nation that has such an idea for its art. I’ve never heard mention of the Great Italian Novel or the Great Brazilian Novel or the Great Kenyan Novel. It’s a very peculiar and particular American idea. It’s interesting to me that this idea has existed for more than 150 years, though, and that it still has a place in our literary discourse—people still throw the term around with seriousness—because it really is a problematic notion of art on a bunch of different levels.
Brooke: Yes, it’s a very masculine if not macho form, to say the least. Gertrude Stein once lamented that, as a lesbian Jewish woman, she would be unable to compose the Great American Novel. Joyce Carol Oates felt similarly and said, “a woman could write it, but then it wouldn't be the Great American Novel.” This is an important reality that women writers are up against. I also want to say that publishing kind of has two lanes. There’s the lane for most writers, and then there’s the lane for the exceptional. And it’s really only a particular kind of writer who gets to write epic novels like these—yes, because they’re extraordinary storytellers, and because they’ve earned it, but there is a particular kind of person who gets to earn it. They come out of MFA programs, you know, there’s a certain something they’ve been ordained with. For the vast majority of writers, a long long book would be the death of the book. But there are those few that can just sell anything, and the longer the better. This can be confusing for some writers who don’t understand why their book is too long at 100,000 words when they’re looking at some of the Great American Novels and wondering why these books are allowed to be 600, 700, 800 pages. It’s just the rules apply differently—and that’s how it is.
Grant: Going back to who gets to write these books, Brooke, Viet Thanh Nguyen, who we just had on the show, said that “one of the unspoken silences of the Great American Novel is the assumption that it can only be written by white men.” That’s definitely true. So I think we need to put the idea of the Great American Novel to rest. I don’t think the notion of it serves us on any artistic level, except perhaps in a satirical way. I also don’t think it serves writers who write novels that then get labeled as attempts at the Great American Novel. I think one should be able to write a big novel and have it exist as a big novel unto itself, without the baggage of it being an attempt to write the Great American Novel, which becomes a target that critics like to take aim at. I think that definitely happened to a degree with our guest today, Garth Risk Hallberg, who not only wrote a big debut novel, but he received a large advance for it, $2 million, which set himself up for scrutiny from critics. There seems to be something about our reading and reviewing culture that when an author gets a big advance, reviewers seem to go into tear-down mode. It’s like they resent an author for breaking through and actually earning some money. I mean, I know part of it is because of the weird culture of awarding some authors huge advances and other authors pittances, but on the other hand, a $2 million advance is nothing compared to what big artists in other fields get. Actors routinely get $20 million for a film, and the top rock stars obviously get paid even more. I think it says something about literary culture that authors are supposed to be not too well paid, and that when they do score a big paycheck, they somehow attract critique. It’s also interesting that big advances seem to be paid out only to big books, as if smaller books don’t deserve a big payout. What do you think, Brooke? Do we have a cultural resistance to authors getting paid a lot? Does the idea of an author getting a big paycheck somehow put their art in question?
Brooke: Well, that’s interesting. I think the whole advance model is very complicated, and who gets what is based on a lot of factors that don’t actually have very logical foundations. It’s impossible to compare what an actor makes to what an author makes because these actors will start out in small roles and break out and then they’re household names, and they can command a lot more money. Few authors really ever reach that stature, and it’s much harder to earn big money in books than it is in film. When you look at a movie like Oppenheimer, for instance, it earned more than $957 million at the box office. If you take a bestselling book, let’s consider Prince Harry’s Spare for instance, which was among the bestsellers of last year. It sold 1.43 million copies. Harry is purported to have earned $27 million, and even just the sales on 1.43 million copies you have $35 million. So you know, it’s a fraction of $957 million, that’s all. But you asked if we have a cultural resistance to authors getting paid a lot. I actually don’t think we do. I think we have a cultural resistance to paying very much money for books, and that people read a lot less than they watch shows and movies, and so it makes Hollywood and the movie industry exist in a totally different stratosphere than New York publishing and the book industry.
Grant: Well, I know that envy plays a big role in judging people’s novels through the lens of their advance. One thing I’m envious of with big novels is that when they’re good, they invite such a deep immersion. Some of my best reading experiences have been when I get lost in hundreds of pages and when the bigness of the novel seems to wrap itself around my life. I love how Garth in our talk with him said “the sweet spot of a novel is when you’re rushing to find out what’s happening in it, but at the same time it’s so good that you’re wanting to pause and immerse yourself in it more deeply.”
Brooke: I’m sure that’s true. I see a lot of authors feeling that way. Luckily, I have zero aspirations to write fiction, so I experience zero envy when I read great works of fiction. I think all I feel now is loss, that this is something that’s missing in my life that I’d like to rekindle—the tackling of The Big Novel. So this has been an inspiring chat for me, Grant. I think I am going to download an audiobook of one of those books on my bucket list and start making my way through. And I’m eager to connect with Garth Risk Hallberg who’s 2015 debut novel, City on Fire, is a cool 944 pages, and also now going on my bucket list after having had this opportunity to connect with him today. We’ll treat you to that conversation right after this not at all long break.
This Week’s Book Trend:
This week's #booktrend is about an Esquire article with the headline, “Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?” that was a cause of some riled-up emotions. There's not truly news here, because it’s always been tough to launch a debut novel, and publishing is a harsh, cruel world where if your debut novel doesn’t sell then it does often affect your chances for your next novel, or send you onto a different course. This is the focus of the #WriteMindedPodcast trend this week, as we explore debut fiction and cover the three points the article suggests an author needs in order to break out.
ABOUT GARTH RISK HALLBERG
Garth Risk Hallberg’s first novel, City on Fire, was a New York Times and international best seller and was selected as one of the best books of 2015 by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and others, and adapted into the Apple TV+ series of the same name. He is also the author of the novella A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, Granta named him one of the Best of Young American Novelists. His new novel is Second Coming.
I love big novels, as I love getting totally involved and lost in another time and place. I read most of the novels listed during summers between school when I had the time to do so.