doorstoppers

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

A more or less playful doorstopper race seemed to go on for
decades:

The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) - 756 pages
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)   - 760 pages
LETTERS (1979)             - 772 pages
Mason & Dixon (1997)       - 773 pages

If memory serves me right, Barth disses The Recognitions in
passing in an essay of his, the ostensible reason being that
a novel mustn't be more than 772 pages long...

But JB is a lesser writer than WG or TRP. Have any of you
read LETTERS from beginning to end? I haven't, and it's
unlikely that I ever will.


Heikki

P.S. Does anyone read Thomas Wolfe's novels these days? Novels
like the almost 1000-page-long Of Time and The River. Haven't
read anything by him.