Two of the most common complaints about novels concern their length and the perceived unrealism of their dialogue. Yet, these criticisms often misunderstand the very nature of the novel as an art form. Length is not a measure of a novel’s quality or even its genre, and fictional dialogue is not meant to be a direct transcript of reality.
The monumental scale of the novel is not exclusive to 19th-century realism. Modernist and postmodern masterpieces like Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Alasdair Gray’s Lanark both span over a million words. These works demonstrate that extended length is a recurring feature across literary movements. Furthermore, a novel’s length does not determine its category. For example, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is considered a novella, while Franz Kafka’s The Castle, despite its considerable length, is often classified as a short story. A work’s true value lies not in its size but in its substance.
Similarly, the complaint that fictional dialogue—especially in 19th-century works—is unnatural and verbose misses a crucial point about the art of writing. While the elaborate conversations of a Jane Austen novel may seem artificial compared to a modern-day transcript, they are an essential part of the work’s artistic design. This is true for many literary styles. The dialogues of Raymond Carver or Ernest Hemingway’s early short stories, for instance, are meticulously crafted and deceptively simple. While they may take up a large portion of the text, they feel entirely natural because they are designed to convey character and emotion in a concentrated way.
This brings us to the core principle of fiction: a novel does not serve as a direct representation of reality but rather creates a parallel world. A fictional work constructs a self-contained universe that evokes memories and emotions from our own reality, creating a resonance rather than a perfect mirror. Just as we accept the heightened language of a Shakespearean play or a Greek tragedy, we must understand that a novel’s dialogue and narrative scale are artistic constructs intended to serve its own internal logic, not to replicate the world outside its pages.
If a reader experiences discomfort with a novel’s length or dialogue, it may be due to a personal aesthetic preference or a poor translation, not a flaw in the work itself. The 19th century’s economic and social developments indeed led to an unprecedented flourishing of the novel, but this rise in popularity was not a consequence of, nor did it cause, the length of individual works. Rather, the era’s changes expanded the scope of stories that authors could write and readers could consume, pushing the boundaries of what the novel could be.