The U.S. publisher Viking recently hit on a bright idea. Biographies, always reliable sellers, were nevertheless getting too long, they thought. Lives of even minor luminaries were routinely checking in at 800 or more pages, sometimes in multiple volumes; there was no such thing as an incident trivial or dull enough to be left out. Viking knew that this elephantine tendency went in cycles: The triple-decker door-stoppers popular in the 19th century were sandwiched between such masterpieces of compression as John Aubrey's "Brief Lives" and Lytton Strachey's lapidary "Eminent Victorians." Gambling that the reading public was ready for "the eloquent economy" of the short form again, Viking therefore launched in January the first two volumes in its Penguin Lives series, none of which will exceed 150 pages or so. If Florence Nightingale could be captured on an "inch of ivory," a la Strachey, why not Marcel Proust or Crazy Horse (the Penguin series' openers) or the queen of the ivory inch, Jane Austen herself (promised for later this year)? Why not, indeed, anyone? The trick, as Strachey said in his preface to "Eminent Victorians," is simply to avoid "scrupulous narration," directing a searchlight instead into "unexpected places."
Viking is evidently onto something, as the new series' instant success attests -- although it has been helped as well by its imaginative pairing of subjects and biographers. (It will be hard to resist the forthcoming life of St. Augustine by Mr. Garry Wills or of Mao Zedong by Mr. Jonathan Spence.) But the latest mandate to be brief is itself worth a moment's reflection. It did not begin, after all, with Viking. Brevity is in the air. Short is definitely modish. Let us count the ways:
One-day cricket, which has arguably ousted the turtle-paced five-day match as the sport's most popular form.