If it’s well written, that is.

At Geist, we are fans of the long sentence, if it is well constructed—that is, if all of its parts matter, and if the reader can follow it with ease.

Here’s a delightful 208-word example, from The Double by José Saramago (trans. Margaret Jull Costa):

Perhaps he's resting in the peace of his home with his wife and his children, if he has any, perhaps, as he was the other day, he is busy at a film shoot, perhaps there is no one in the apartment, the children because they have gone to spend the holidays with their grandparents, the mother because, like so many others, she has a job to go to, either to safeguard a position of real or imagined personal independence or because the household finances cannot survive without her material contribution, for the fact is that, however quickly a supporting actor scurries from small role to small role, however often he is selected by the production company that uses him now on a more or less tacitly exclusive basis, the money he can earn will always be subordinated to the rigors of the law of supply and demand, which is never based on the objective needs of the subject but purely on the latter's real or imagined talents and abilities, those that it favors him with recognizing or those that, with unknown and usually negative intent, are attributed to him, forgetting that he might have other, less visible talents and abilities that might be worth putting to the test.

At Geist, we are not fans of a sentence that is long because it is crammed with miscellaneous information. For more on this, see "Sentences: A sentence is a thought, not a warehouse," in our Writer's Toolbox.