Breathe Easy; the World is Now Safe

To mark the start of summer, I read Robert Ludlum's The Sigma Protocol. The plot, you ask? Evil Conspiracy threatens to destroy all Good Things in the World; Our Heroes (who are just regular people, well except they are beautiful and brilliant and very, very wealthy and rather clever and brave and have lots of friends who can do huge favors for them whenever it is needed, but other than that they are regular people) thwart the international Evil Conspiracy (which has, naturally enough, unlimited resources and near-omniscience (near-omniscience, and not complete omniscience, only because the Evil People suddenly have lapses in knowledge at convenient plot points)).

That is of course the plot of every Ludlum novel.

I am not sure why I can tolerate Ludlum novels--I liked them a lot more back when I was in high school and had only read a few of them. They are all the same. But, I will add that The Sigma Protocol gets bonus points for having a quotation from "Gerontion" in it.

One thing that puzzles me about this sort of novel--the one I just read was 650 pages long. It was just too long. But, this sort of too-longness has become quite common. Why? Are people who buy cheap genre fiction more likely to buy a 650 page novel than a 300 page novel on the "it's more pages for your dollar" theory? Is it too hard to write well enough to get a cohesive plot in 300 pages, so the authors aim for an incoherent plot in 650 pages, hoping nobody notices the disconnect between what happened on page 100 and what happened on page 523?

One other puzzle--what is the enjoyment of reading cheap genre fiction? That isn't a sneering question--I read it and enjoy it (well at least some of the genres--I have never read anything in the Romance genre (should I correct this lapse in my education?))--but for the life of me I can't figure out why I just read a Ludlum novel--I knew it would be painfully long, rather silly in the end and have absolutely no literary merit, but I still read it and I enjoyed it. So why?