When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.
Interpretation
A lengthy novel allows readers to discover numerous pleasures and insights, enhancing their experience upon re-reading.
This quote by Jane Smiley emphasizes the rich experience that readers can have with a lengthy novel. With a substantial word count, each word contributes to a tapestry of delights, insights, and emotional journeys that readers can enjoy not only once but repeatedly. The possibility of revisiting these experiences can lead to even greater appreciation and understanding upon reflection.
In practice
During a book club discussion, you can highlight how a novel's length leads to deeper emotional journeys.
I say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don't recognize you any longer, that's the real compliment.
Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.
I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.
Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer's is coming mocks all one's aspirations - to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one's accomplishments and hard work - in a way that old familiar death does not.
The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.
What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.
The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.
It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'
If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.
Dialogue is the place that books are most alive and forge the most direct connection with readers. It is also where we as writers discover our characters and allow them to become real.
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