Vikram Seth’s 1993 novel, A Suitable Boy, is long.
It’s not the kind of long felt by English literature students plodding through Milton and Melville or by Twitter addicts suddenly faced with narrative long-form. This is the kind of long that gives you wrist ache, sinks in bathtubs, weighs down totes and handbags, and cracks its own spine, seemingly overwhelmed by the weight of all it contains.
The words “doorstopper” and “epic” and “rambling” and “exhaustive” are thrown around quite often in blurbs and review copies. A few novels that have been thus described include Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (709 pages), Stephen King’s The Stand (823 pages), Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1024 pages), and Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1225 pages). Even David Foster’s Wallace’s Infinite Jest, notorious for its 388 end notes that sometime contain further footnotes and for a specific kind of reader-ly demographic it attracts, clocks in at 1079 pages.