A perfect short story is like a song you can’t get out of your head. When I think of these perfect little sculpted pieces, I recall great little ditties like Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” and its unflinching depiction of adultery. Or Hemingway’s earliest stoic yet tumultuous short stories, which show a gathering darkness right at the dawn. I also think of Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar” and its tiny primal wickedness.
But as much I appreciate a great short story, there is nothing like a big, scary book which takes every risk imaginable – and opens up new horizons for you.
I ain’t talking ‘bout horror, necessarily. Let me explain through an example set by one of them, if I may.
Roberto Bolano wrote the massive 2666 while he was slowly dying. And he addressed the risk he was taking doing it, right within his book. He depicts a professor named Almalfitano talking to a pharmacist about reading. The nerdy little prescription-filler tells him he likes to read pieces like the Metamorphosis by Kafka, Bartleby the Scrivener by Melville, and A Christmas Carol by Dickens.
But the professor immediately bemoans the choices are not, respectively: The Trial, Moby Dick, and A Tale of Two Cities:
“What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
This is an example of the kind of risk-taking, scary, often lengthy book that excites this reader.
I think 2666, at 900 pages, is itself one of them. Of the ones I have read, Moby Dick is another. I would also lump Ulysses by Joyce in there, as well as Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, Don Quixote by Cervantes, Underworld by Don DeLillo, and the Sea of Fertility tetralogy by Yukio Mishima.
All these books are big open questions about the human experience, with huge terrifying inquiries into what it means to be human, the nature of our history and memory – and frankly, whether life is worth living. There is nothing more important.
In 2666, it was the interconnectivity of history and fate which made clear that most life is just happenstance. Moby Dick teaches us obsessions over the horizon – or deep beneath our hulls – can be our destiny and undoing at the same time. The Sea of Fertility tells us nothing truly means anything, and we can’t even be sure of our own eyes, or soul.
But these books are so much more than that – and they are multiples lives’ experience, within each and every one.
Of course, the gambit doesn’t always pay off. (See: City on Fire, Garth Risk Hallberg; 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami; and most parts of The Recognitions by William Gaddis). Even though I was a tour guide at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin for some months in 2003, Finnegan’s Wake is a ridiculous book stop.
As someone once told me in college, “size ain’t shit.”
The ones I have not read (but hope to some day): Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Remembrances of Things Past by Marcel Proust, and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I am eager to try the first two, the third one will be a second stab at a writer who I consider to be an absolute intellectual leper, the polar opposite of everything I try to do in my writing… and I want to justify my distaste. (I’m just being honest).
Regardless, my point is: big torrential books like these are the kind of art that can still be daring and exciting, even in the 21st century. Reading novels like these, in which these people with unparalleled skill plunge into the unknown, like deep-sea divers into the deepest ocean trenches of the human heart, are what can give some true meaning to this life that is still not possible on TV – no matter how good HBO or Netflix are getting at making binge-worthy art.
I’d get into how this informs how I approach my art, and each of the five books I have written by my mid-30s – but that’s for another time. I have to go dive back into my latest work in progress, and there’s work to be done.