I forget the author, but he was popular and wrote books with titles like 'Chesepeake' and 'Hawaii' and his novels were huge simply to encompass vast plots and enourmous amounts of research. It was very popular, workmanlike writing and his books sold wildly. But your Fosters and DeLillos seem to largely extrapolate techniques of poetry and short fiction to absurd lengths. I love Foster but mainly for his nonfiction essays and occasionally his short stories and I prefer shorter forms in general because I do most of my reading on the toilet like my Dad.