Best long novels

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Originally Posted by JonathanB

Nobody's mentioned Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. I read it on a long overland journey mainly by train to Cyprus and left my copy there with the friend I was visiting. I enjoyed it. It is very, very long.

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A Suitable Boy is a wise love story (usually not my genre) and an effective historical novel (if 1952 counts). And there's nothing like getting to page 1000 in a book and seeing that you still have 475 pages to go! Here are a couple of (brief) comments I wrote about it at one time or another. I remember asking you, Jonathan, how you managed to read it on a train to Cyprus without getting the pages soggy.

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Originally Posted by Pompey Bum

I think that A Suitable Boy will have staying power exactly because it is so pre-mod. It's all about earnestness over irony and conventional narrative structure over smoke and mirrors. My guess is that the next generation will rebel against the hipsters and prefer writers more like Seth. A Suitable Boy is massive, of course, so that may limit its popular appeal. Seth keeps saying he's writing a sequel. I'll believe it when I see it. But I predict A Suitable Boy will become a classic.

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Originally Posted by Pompey Bum

I thought it was sweet and worthwhile if not terribly deep. And I loved the choice she made at the end. To me, A Suitable Boy was sort of Trollope-esque literature-- but not Dickens or Fielding by half. I'd recommend it to someone with a broken leg--or maybe a woman who finds herself pregnant. In fact, it would make a nice gift.

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A couple of truly great, long 20thc novels not yet mentioned:

William Gaddis, The Recognitions
Authenticity and fraud in the art scene of 1950s Manhattan with an art forger (Wyatt Gwyon) as its main character.

Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
A 20thc War and Peace focused on the siege of Stalingrad.

A few that I had not seen mentioned already

Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
The Magic Mountain
Cancer Ward

The Death of the Detective. Almost a long novel.

I would hardly consider Crime and Punishment a long novel, but maybe that's just me...

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Originally Posted by sweetcaroline

I would hardly consider Crime and Punishment a long novel, but maybe that's just me...

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It isn't a long novel but it sure seems like one.

Edit: How about Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, in excess of 1000 pp. and considered by some to be his masterpiece although, despite being bowled over by the writing, not by me: that honour being reserved for Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence.

The Man Without Qualities By Musil is long. Some time ago someone recommended that I read 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, a long novel which I completely failed to make sense of.

John Steinbeck's East of Eden.