How Long is Too Long a Book?

I finally finished rereading Vera Brittain‘s Testament of Youth last night, all 660 pages of it.

I had to finish it–the library refused to let me renew it a third time and I couldn’t quite remember how it ended. It was due today.

Written in 1933, it’s the intense story of Brittain’s lost youth during World War I. Masterpiece Theater did a production of it in 1980–which is why I originally read the book and its subsequent sequels: Testament of Friendship and Testament of Experience.

Because I’m working on a World War I saga, it was important I read primary source material about that time and Brittain’s work told me things like August 4, 1914, was hot and people fought over ham at the store. Some sections of the book are lyrical with beauty, “it was one of those shimmering autumn days when every leaf and flower seems to scintillate with light,” and the poetry Brittain shares with her fiancé Roland Leighton is heartbreaking.

Hedauville, November 1915

The sunshine on the long white road

That ribboned down the hill

Around your window-sill

Are waiting for you still.

Again the shadowed pool shall break

In dimples round your feet,

And when the thrush sings in your wood,

Unknowing you may meet

Another stranger, Sweet.

And if he is not quite so old

As the boy you used to know,

And less proud, too, and worthier,

You may not let him go–

(and daisies are truer than passion-flowers)

It will be better so.

Roland died early on, and the rest of the book chronicles Brittain’s shattering of hope as two other friends and then her most beloved brother Edward also perish in the war.

Some sections are brutal and make you want to weep.

But it’s long.  The print is small. The paragraphs are lengthy. The chapters are extensive.The descriptions sometimes feel over the top.

Is it in need of a modern editor, or a less critical eye?

Is it possible, my brain with 21st century expectations of writing style, is the reason it took so long to read?

Many studies have shown the shortened attention span of our generation. I call it “google-brained.” We need to take things in shorter snippets. We just can’t seem to read with the same focused depth I remember people having a mere twenty years ago.

I’ve always paid attention to how words, sentences and paragraphs look on a page when I write. I try not to have more that four or five sentences in a paragraph. After my training as a reporter, I started using shorter sentences. Why invoke a semi colon when you can just start over with a new sentence?

Blogging is even worse.

The shorter the better.

White space rules.

Don’t you think?

And yet, in reading Brittain’s words, going deep into the story as I concentrated on just what picture she painted, what emotion she evoked, what tears were shed, I felt transported back into a different time and place.

Because so many of her friends were poets, poetry appears often. Edward Brittain was a fine musician, so we get references to music and the text of oratorios.

It did not read like a modern memoir. It almost felt timeless. I slowed down with that time and place until I could see the red poppies and know the stink of trenches. The slimey mud of France marched into the room with me and I felt with Brittain the agony of gut-tightening fear that the telegram at night always brought bad news.

I’m glad I worked through Testament of Youth again. I won’t be moving on to the sequels because I don’t need their feel or information. But it’s given me pause about my own manuscript–not to mention my google-modified-brain.

I’m saddened, though, that I’m not sure I could enjoy anymore the lengthy novels I savored in my youth. Could I do Doctor Zhivago justice now in rereading it? How about Gone with the Wind?

Is it the length that intimidates or the subject matter?

Should it make a difference with a classic story?

How long is too long? How do you judge? In reading a modern novel of that World War I time period, do you want it in terse 21st century writing, or in the languid prose of the past?

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