When the books get shorter & shorter

Browsing in Waterstone's at the weekend, picking up Don DeLillo's Point Omega, and finding 117 pages of wide-margined, doubled-spaced type. Not that I was expecting another Underworld, but it seems a little on the light side. Roth's recent volumes are slim too, compared to what he was putting out a decade ago. I like them fine, but there's a certain emotional punch that heaps of twists and detail can bring.

Why does this happen? Sloth? Is it a type of writer's block, or does the author have just as much to say, he just knows how to say it better? What about authors who don't boil things down (Pynchon?), are they trying to do too much?

DeLillo, Roth & Pynchon are all old men now, at that age and with that work behind them I think they can do what they damn well want.

Yeah, ageing would be my main guess - I always forget (I think because he was a late starter) that DeLillo's in his mid-70s.

On Pynchon: he has sped up to this giddying rate of 2 novels a decade, but I don't think it's a trying-too-much thing - there were rumours of a 19th century novel about mathematicians (so that's a garbled version of Against the Day, I guess) even before Mason & Dixon iirc. I think maybe he was working on Vineland & M&D & ATD during the biiiiig gap (73-90).

Houellebecq, though - fastest book I ever read is Lanzarote, dispatched in thirty minutes while still standing at the shelf in Notting Hill Waterstone's. It was the same as his other books, but with the characters excised. I think that can be put down to laziness and lack of ideas.

Ha - I read that in a Waterstone's too. But both Platform and Poss of an Island came out after it - he's been getting a bit longer if anything. But nothing in 5 years - I think, yes, sloth maybe in his case. Sloth and hookers.