Englewood Entropy: The Problem of Length Writers joke about all the things they can find to do to avoid starting to write. You'll notice they never joke about stopping. Cases in point are too numerous to list, but you might think of, oh, James Joyce as one example of a writer who should have stopped many, many pages before he did. Poets used to be good at knowing when to stop, but with the advent of free verse, etc., that is no longer true. Still, the old poetic templates occasionally reappear and, lo, you find a poem whose economy of content is matched by its economy of form. Novelists are of course the most egregious sinners when it comes to length. If one seeks to lay blame, it's hard to know where to start. Cervantes, because he had so many delicious bones to pick with his society? Melville, because the book had to be at least as big as the whale? Tolstoy, because his country lacked a national epic? Joyce, who just kept going because he knew academics everywhere had the same word monkey on their back that he had? Looking for true economy of means in the world of novelists, one is hard, hard put to find even one exemplary performance. When prose writers go short, they even refuse to call the result a novel. Thus we have "novellas," "short stories," and even "short short stories." It's as if novelists throw up their carpal-tunneled hands and say, "You can't do in a few words what the Masters [meaning Cervantes, Melville, et al.] did in a few hundred thousand words." Until recently, we would have agreed. Now, we beg to differ. For we have stumbled across an extraordinary prose performance which gives the lie to all those generations of word artists who could never bring themselves to write "The End" until they were well into the 64th quarto. The Discovery Reading it, as in the best novels, one is instantly drawn into the writer's world. Disbelief is suspended. We read, we accept, and suddenly it's over. We gasp. We don't know whether to cry to to laugh. As with life, so with art. We always want more. But the greatest art only gives us precisely enough and then s-t-o-p-s. Imagine if Michelangelo after 20 years had said to the pope, "I think I need a second chapel." Or if Shakespeare had dashed off "Son of Hamlet" in which we find out that Ophelia had done herself in after birthing an illegitimate princeling. But our discovery tells its wrenching story in fewer than three dozen words. And then stops. Leaving us in the same over-stimulated condition that encounters with great art always leave us in. One's imagination is activated. Possibly, one's life is changed. There's more. As with the cathedrals of Europe, much of Greek sculpture, and the monuments of Teotihaucan, the creator of this prose masterpiece is anonymous. There's nobody here for Charlie Rose to interview, nobody to do an author's tour. Nobody to reap millions from movie rights and ancillary product tie-ins. Nobody to preen on the cover of People. For what you are about to read is the opening paragraph of an obituary that appeared on the Associated Press wire, June 19, 2000. It was no doubt printed widely, as newspapers filled various holes between advertisements. We came across it in the New York Times of June 20. The obituary actually continued after the first paragraph, but again that is yet another example of the writer/editor combo teaming up to fill more space. The tyranny of Tolstoy we shall always have with us. Make it BIG, make it LONG. Because of the masterly control obvious in the first paragraph, we are confident that the writer, whoever he or she was, knew what he/she had accomplished and would have just stopped. But of course, the world of print wanted more. So the writer filled out the obit with details that would have been better left to the reader's imagination. Thus we present you a novel like no other. Is our tongue in our cheek here? Not really. Not really. The fact that we are devoting an entire special issue of Magellan's Log to this one small bit of prose should give you an idea about the seriousness of our intent. Read, and decide for yourself. Go to "The World's Shortest Novel." >>
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