I own four used copies of the same nineteenth-century novel, bought at different times and in different states, and if you stand them on a table and look at the spines from the side, three of them are cracked in approximately the same place — at the opening of what is, in my edition, chapter eleven, roughly a fifth of the way in. The fourth is uncracked all the way through, which is its own kind of information, and which I take to mean that its owner either read it very carefully or never opened it at all.
A cracked spine is a record of where a book was held open for a long time. It is not a perfect instrument. Books get pressed flat by other books, they get left face-down, a crease can come from a single careless afternoon. Over four copies, bought from four unconnected sources, a crease in the same signature is suggestive and it is not a fact about readers in general. Four is four. What I can say is that three of my four copies were held open at one page for long enough to break the spine there, and that when I started asking students where they had stopped, the same passage came up more often than chance would give it.
I went and looked at that page. It is the beginning of a subplot involving a secondary family, introduced abruptly, with four new names in two paragraphs, and it takes eighty pages to demonstrate why it was necessary. It is, in the accounting of the whole book, one of the reasons the whole book works. It is also, unmistakably, where the novel asks a reader to extend credit, and a certain fraction of readers decline.
This is the sort of thing I used to find charming and have come to find alarming, because of what I now watch it do to what gets taught.
Here is the claim. The novels that survive on syllabuses are increasingly the ones that can be discussed productively by a room in which most people have not finished them — and that is a selection pressure operating on the curriculum, quietly, through the ordinary good faith of teachers who want a seminar to go well.
Let me describe the mechanism, because it is not that anybody is lazy. Set a four-hundred-page novel to a class of twenty and, realistically, six have read it, eight have read half, four have read a summary, and two have not started. That is not a moral failure of eighteen-year-olds; most of mine have jobs, and the ones who do not have jobs have four other courses. Now run a seminar. The discussion that works — the one where people talk, where somebody says something nobody expected, where the hour goes fast — is the discussion whose material is available in the first fifth. Themes stated early. A vivid opening situation. A narrator whose voice can be characterised from page three.
The discussion that fails is the one that depends on the reversal in chapter thirty-one, because six people cannot have it and fourteen people are watching them have it.
So a teacher learns, across a few years and without ever deciding anything, which books produce good rooms. And a book that produces a good room is one whose argument is legible before the spine cracks.
The counterargument is strong and it is not the one people expect. It is not that students should simply read more. That is true and it is useless, and it is also the position of someone who has forgotten what it is like to have an eight-hour shift on a Wednesday. The real counterargument is that the short novel is not a lesser form and never was — that a great deal of the best writing in the last century is under two hundred pages, that the four-hundred-page nineteenth-century novel was a serialised commercial product whose length was determined by a payment schedule, and that treating length as an index of seriousness is a snobbery with no defensible basis.
I agree with all of that and it does not touch my worry, because my worry is not about length. It is about the particular thing that can only happen after a reader has extended credit for eighty pages and had it repaid. That experience — the one where a book that seemed to be wasting your time turns out to have been building something — is not available in any short work, not because short works are lesser but because that specific pleasure is made of duration. It is the only literary experience I know that cannot be described to somebody who has not had it, and it is the one thing a syllabus optimised for good seminars will reliably drop.
I have started assigning the difficult book in the last third of term, when the room is already a room and the students will extend credit to me rather than to the novel, which feels like a cheat and works. The seminar on chapter eleven is bad. The seminar in week eleven is the best one I run all year, and every year somebody says a version of the same thing, which is that they had wanted to stop and had not, and were now unable to explain to a friend why the book was good.
The uncracked copy is the one I teach from. I bought it for six dollars from a shop that was closing, and there is a receipt in it for a different book entirely, and a bus ticket, and nothing at all in the margins, and I have never been able to decide what happened in that house.
