Short is sweet when it comes to fiction
Posted by Guardian blogger  Robert Collins  Wednesday 17 March 2010    guardian.co.uk 

Novels don't have to be long to say something — just look at A Clockwork Orange, The Great GatsbyThe Outsider and , all of which barely break the 100-page barrier and fit nicely in your back pocket

Above - Small, but so portable ... A miniature Book of Hours. Photograph: PA

What have On Chesil Beach, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Don DeLillo's Point Omega got in common? Bewitching narratives concealing hidden depths? Check. Characters dealing with broken lives? Check. Authors performing at the peak of their prowess? Check. All read by me in a single week recently? Oh yes, check. How? Because they're all under 150 pages long.

It's taken me a long time to realise how much I love short novels — those unintimidating, pencil-thick volumes which say: "Pick me up. I won't take up too much of your time. You could read me over (a longish) breakfast." The Outsider, A Clockwork Orange, The Great Gatsby, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star, The Old Man and the Sea and Of Mice and Men all barely break the 100-page barrier. The last three don't even do that.

When they're this good, short novels come close to perfection in a manner for which longer novels are simply not equipped. Big, sprawling novels are glorious precisely because they're allowed to run riot. What's The Bonfire of the Vanities if not wordiness made incarnate over 730 pages? ("Heh-heggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" — that's on page one.) After 600 pages of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, I'd have been happy for him to go on for 600 more. Yet with Joshua Ferris's ingenious Then We Came to the End, I thought it was ingenious 100 pages in. Did he have to go on being ingenious for another 280?
The full story at the Guardian.