BREVITY MAY BE the soul of wit, but it's not intrinsic to good storytelling. The epic can marshal a fan base every bit as loyal as the finely told compact tale. Modern literature is defined by the novel, and the great novelists - from Proust to Pynchon - have not been exactly terse. John Irving, in a 1989 interview, offered a defense of this discursiveness:
I have a very simple formula, which is that you've got to be more interested on page 320 than on page 32 [...] These days [...] I see most novels 120 pages long printed in type large enough to be for the blind, and I don't think those are novels. I don't think there's enough story in them or enough character or enough intricacy to hold my attention for the first 20 pages, much less to drag myself through all 120 pages [...] Let no one forget [...] that when I say I'm only a storyteller, I'm not being humble.
