Abstract
Critics often describe long novels as “networked”; this chapter investigates what happens when we model connections between characters in novels as social networks. Using basic metrics in network analysis, I compare a small set of contemporary U.S. novels to one another. This experiment suggests character co-occurrence, which measures the density of repeated connections between characters, as a heuristic for understanding novelistic length. Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings emerges as an outlier in this discussion because of its high character co-occurrence value. I emphasize two potential avenues of exploration based on this observation: one uses character co-occurrence as one aspect of a computational model of length; another uses character co-occurrence to inflect a close reading of the importance of intimacy in James’s novel.