This is not a plea for hasty work or for the death of the big novel. If there’s a “Middlemarch” or a “Magic Mountain” or a “House for Mr. Biswas” to be had, yes, please, bring it on. These novels are sustained and sustaining; they are also extreme rarities.

It’s not hard to sense what these modern, parsimonious writers are rebelling against. Surely they’re in flight from the shackling apparatus of modern publishing: the long press tours (“Hello, Cleveland!”), the much-hated publicity stops. The very economics of being a writer function as a set of speed bumps. Most novelists hold down teaching positions that subsidize their work; these jobs are also work-thwarters.

Some novelists may be in revolt against today’s almost militarily mechanized pop writers. Not so long ago a dignified genre writer — a John Grisham, let’s say — was expected to issue a book a year. Now we confront James Patterson, who publishes as many as nine a year; they pop from the chute like Krispy Kremes. Many of Patterson’s books are composed with other writers, as if he had a tree filled with Keebler elves outfitted with laptops and wee kegs of Red Bull.

For some novelists who write long and slow, there may be a subconscious critical strategy at play. As the critic Dwight Macdonald once put it, “It is difficult for American reviewers to resist a long, ambitious novel: they are betrayed by the American admiration of size and scope, also by the American sense of good fellowship; they find it hard to say to the author, after all his work: ‘Sorry, but it’s terrible.’ ”

Another result of the once-a-decade approach is that you feel obliged to put out novels that appear to have genuinely taken 10 years to write. Franzen’s “Freedom” (576 pages) could have stood some liposuction, and Tartt’s “Little Friend” (640 pages) would have benefited from a great deal of it. Few readers wished these books — or Eugenides’s “Middlesex” (544 pages) — longer. The Brits have always been better at not overstaying their welcome. In the 1980s and ’90s, Julian Barnes delivered a running master class in the shortish novel, and Ian McEwan, running alongside him, picked up the baton. But here in America, we respect girth. “Middlesex” may go down as Eugenides’s signal accomplishment. But it’s his ethereal and almost novella-length “Virgin Suicides” I’ll reread first and perhaps even often. I feel about it the way its young protagonists did, watching one of the teenage Lisbon sisters in an intimate moment: “The zipper opened all the way down our spines.”

Art is supposed to emerge, unless you are Jackson Pollock or Banksy, slowly; it drips rather than flows. We are suspicious of ease. It has always been easy to poke fun at overwriters. Most-prolific lists are packed with regrettable names like Barbara Cartland (700-plus books), Isaac Asimov (400 plus) and the South African Mary Faulkner, no relation to William, who wrote more than 900 books. At minimum, a writer’s book should be like his or her serious boyfriends or girlfriends; if there are some you can’t remember, you have had too many.

Serious writers are sometimes mocked for logorrhea as well. According to the novelist and biographer Jay Parini, himself no slouch in the production department, there’s a story about a graduate student who telephoned the great literary critic Harold Bloom at home. Bloom’s wife answered and said, “I’m sorry, he’s writing a book.” The student replied: “That’s all right. I’ll wait.”