It’s not just reader laziness that makes me feel a lot of books should be shorter. Too many novels dawdle and sag in the middle, drooping between the tautness of an intriguing start and the firmness of a dramatic conclusion. The latest novel by Jesmyn Ward is a case in point. Ward is a big name these days: her last two novels, Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), made her the first woman, and the first African American, to win the National Book award twice. Her new novel has clearly not been rushed, and yet when reading it I couldn’t help wishing – to adapt Blaise Pascal – that she had taken the time to make it shorter.
Yes, it does start strong, in both style (“The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand,” goes the opening line) and content; the narrator Annis’s mother takes her into the woods and repeatedly beats her with a tree limb. We learn that her mother is teaching Annis to fight for herself – “in this world, you your own weapon” – and with good reason. We’re in North Carolina in the time of slavery, and Annis and her mother are enslaved on a plantation.
