What a great time of year! The The Nobel Prize in Literature. The National Book Awards. And the Man Booker Prize.

With this kind of excitement and anticipation it’s like combining Christmas with the Oscars!

One of the shortlisted works, Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach” is stirring up a bit of controversy due to its short length. It’s over 200 pages, which seems like an adequate length, but for anyone who’s had the actual book in their hand knows, the diminutive size must also be taken into consideration. Had the book been expanded into the normal size of a typical hardcover, the book would probably be a lot fewer pages.

So how do you define the “length” of a book? Number of pages seems inadequate as that can easily be manipulated by the publisher by tweaking spacing, font, and page size. And if you use a thicker stock of paper, the book will also seem longer and more formidable due to its increased girth.

So number of words? Just like an assignment in school: Real classy.

But good for Mr. McEwan who stoically commented that “That’s their problem, not mine, I think,” referring to the very obvious fact that the Man Booker Prize judges can and should give their award to whoever they damn well please. Ultimately these very abstract, artistic decisions must be made by the knowledgeable, deliberate individuals chosen to do so. Just as the rules of the Man Booker Prize state, the prize will be awarded to the “author of the best, eligible full-length novel in the opinion of the judges.”

But I do fault McEwan for off-handedly commenting that, “You allow yourself the possibility of writing in real time…It could never be a long novel.”

I disagree.

Virginia Woolf gave herself very similar temporal restrictions in books like “Mrs. Dalloway” and “The Waves” and achieved great, very successful works of more traditional, “acceptable” length.

Filed under: Books, news
No Comments »