Long & Short: The Return of the Novella

The original, 1937 cover for Of Mice and Men

I write “return” with a degree of critical care. Did the novella ever leave? If yes, why had it gone? Or maybe it was never really big at all, and therefore isn’t making a return so much as a début. All of this is unclear to me. But what has become definitely apparent is that there’s been a recent surge in interest for novellas. The form is infamously tricky to define, of course. A novella is supposed to be book-length, because it can be published on its own, but not quite novel-length. But then, does the novella exist at all? Maybe it’s just a long short story, or else a short novel. In terms of content and form — this has nothing to do with length — I have certainly found this true on some occasions. Some novellas, like Ethel Wilson’s “Tuesday and Wednesday” and “Lily’s Story,” which are collected in her Equations of Love, feel like short stories that have been inflated. In terms of emotional resonance and narrative breadth, they remain, well, a little short. Other novellas, like James’ The Aspern Papers, are much shorter than novels, but pack the punch of longer, more ambitious works.

 

Some clues as to the return of the novella:

To begin with, there was Julian Barnes’ first Booker victory in October with The Sense of and Ending, which was the shortest book on the shortlist, and has been called a novella by some. Also, last year, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris inaugurated the Paris Literary Prize to celebrate the novella, which is awarded to a work of fiction between 20,000 and 30,000 words. And let’s remember how much ink was spilled a few years ago about Robert Bolano’s posthumous masterpiece 2666, which is really 5 interlinked novellas. Also, the American short story genius Jim Shepard’s most recent collection, You Think That’s Bad, contained a novella titled “Gojira, King of the Monsters”, which was also published separately as a stand-alone book. As for publishing houses, Penguin has of course recently had a lot of success with elegant collections of short books: Penguin Great Ideas, Penguin English Journeys, Penguin Great Loves… Last year, they came out with Mini Modern Classics, 50 short pieces of fiction, published as their own, lovely little books, to celebrate 50 years of Penguin Classics. What’s great about the selection is that the editors have generally chosen little-known stories; letting them stand on their own gives them some well-deserved visibility. To be fair, a lot of the stories that make up the books in the series are actually short stories, not novellas. Moreover, from what I can see most of the volumes collect more than one story. Borges’ The Widow Ching—Pirate, for instance, also includes 5 other stories from the Argentine master. The design for the collection is very nice, playing off the silver, black, and white of the traditional Penguin Modern Classics, with much bigger author pictures on the back covers. Penguin has also released 5 production videos for the series: they’re great fun to watch.

More directly novella-related, perhaps, Melville House, which is becoming increasingly renowned for great books and great designs, has published a collection of books called The Art of the Novella, featuring, among many others, Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, and 5 different stories entitled The Duel (by Casanova, Checkhov, Conrad, von Kleist, and Kuprin). The whole series is a great idea, and is perfectly executed: the choice is varied and classic, and the designs are remarkably simple and fresh. Their selection is sometimes a little wobbly in terms of form, however: I’m not entirely sure The Hounds of the Baskerville, for instance, is usually considered to be a novella, but that’s another story…

All this attention on novellas is wonderful; for one thing, novellas are awesome. They’re short enough to be read in a few sittings and to be quite focused aesthetically, but they’re also long enough that they have the time to creep into the brain of the reader; they cut out their own space and demand that their issues be addressed. I have a short-standing theory that the act of reading happens en deux temps. Maybe this only happens to me, but I feel like I always need a short period of adaptation when I start reading a book, not really to get used to the characters and the setting so much as to adjust my reader’s ear to the rhythm of the writer’s voice and the linguistic rules of the book’s universe. I believe this is why I can’t immerse myself completely in a book and read long swaths of it in one sitting until I’ve passed a certain point (sometimes this point comes early, sometimes later, never after the midway point) — then all is well and I can drive on to the end, perfectly attuned to the story’s music. The advantage with novellas is that they’re so short and well-formed that even a reading en deux temps can occur quickly. You can begin with two or three short sittings to start immersing yourself in the world of the story bit by bit, like a swimmer gradually dipping his limbs deeper and deeper in cold water, and then finish off the rest of the story in a single, smooth dive. The novella invites you to do all of that in one day, or even a few hours. Ideally, I would suggest leaving a night’s sleep in the middle to allow the shift to occur and finish the novella the next day — it makes the experience last longer. 

Long-winded, baggy novels are great, but I have a particular fondness for the tight focus of short books. Among my favorite novellas are Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Alice Munro’s ”A Queer Streak”, Mann’s Death in Venice, James Joyce’s “The Dead”, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Henry James’ ”The Lesson of the Master”, Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Disinherited”, Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Some of these straddle the line with the short story or the novel, but the long and short of it is that they’re just the right length. Plus, they’re all exquisite and quick to revisit. Between lengthy dinners and short shopping sprees, why don’t we all dip into a novella for the Holidays? Happy reading!

Atwood Covers Here and Elsewhere, Continued

My last post was about the covers of Margaret Atwood’s books in the Canada. Now I’d like to turn to the cover designs of her books in the US and the UK. Like McClelland, Atwood’s American publisher, Anchor, also created a consistent template (black strip with authors name and colored strip with novel’s title at the bottom, with the image, usually a collage, taking about two-thirds of the space, at the top). I can’t say they’re as bad as the old Canadian covers, but then they’re not terribly attractive either. There are a few exceptions, however: maybe because they’re the last books of fiction she published, The Blind Assassin, Moral Disorder, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood have their own individual cover designs (I haven’t included them here). 

In the UK, Atwood’s books are divided between two publishers. Vintage, a publishing house renowned for its stunning cover work, owns the rights for Bodily Harm, Life Before Man, Bluebeard’s Egg, Dancing Girls, and The Handmaid’s Tale. They’ve created a consistent templates for their catalogue of Atwood paperbacks. The other covers feature figures cut out in paper, which are a little bit strange but certainly intriguing. I love the typography they use to write Atwood’s name, with the leafy double-Os.

The exception in the Vintage Atwood catalogue is The Handmaid’s Tale, for which they have no less than four different paperback covers: one as part of their normal Atwood series, one for their Vintage Classics series, on in thier Vintage Future Classics, as well as a special edition for the 21st anniversary of the publishing house. 

Virago, which has the publishing rights for many more of Atwood’s books in the UK, like The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, Cat’s Eye, The Rober Bride, and so on, commissioned talented graphic designer Nathan Burton to create the covers for their collection of Atwoods. The result is stunning, and the series remains one of my favourite cover designs ever. These have all been showcased on the Caustic Cover Critic’s blog before, I put a few just to give you an idea. Aren’t they wonderful?

Atwood Covers Here and Elsewhere

This is the North American cover for Margaret Atwood's book on science-fiction, out in October. I'm not entirely sure what to think about this one; the angle in the writing at the top makes me a little dizzy.

When a writer has been productive over a large number of years and has reached a certain level of prominence, you’d think this author’s publishers would take the opportunity to create elegant, consistent designs in order to make the books stand out as a group. In the case of Margaret Atwood, the famous Canadian poet, novelist, inventor, and ecological activist, this opportunity was certainly there, although what her Canadian, American, and British publishers did with the designs of her books has not necessarily given the most fortunate results. 

Same book, different cover. The British cover design for In Other Worlds uses the same elements as the North American cover, but has fit them into the rest of their Atwood collection.

For one, Atwood’s Canadian publisher, McClelland, used to have horrendous covers for her novels, featuring sepia-toned, blurry images of naked women and odd collages. All the covers had the same, plain black border. I’ve put some bellow. Most, as you see, are not particularly attractive, some are interesting, others are plain ugly. 

More recently, McCelland have released new paperback Atwoods, with generally nicer monochrome images and more modern (although a tad redundant) font work. Although some of these new covers remain a little bit unremarkable, they’re all a great improvement on the old ones, and some of them are quite good. I especially like when the photographs have been tampered a bit to look old or grainy. The covers I prefer in this collection are Alias Grace and The Handmaid’s Tale.

As an aside, the image used on the cover of The Blind Assassin is the same one Penguin used on the cover of their Red Classics edition of The Great Gatsby.

For Atwood’s American and UK covers, see the next post!

Gardening and Bathroom Lit

You spend so much of your life in bathroom, it's only logical to have decent stash of books to keep yourself distracted.

In a recent article in The Atlantic Wire, Margaret Atwood shared her usual media diet — that is, a complete report of where and when she gets her information during the day. The article had Atwood’s telltale humor and usual sense of derision (“there’s nothing except food and drink that I can’t live without,” she remarks casually, “I take these questions literally”), but what I found interesting is what she had to say about a particular kind of reading we all take part in, but rarely talk about — the one we do in the bathroom. As Atwood defines it, “[b]athroom reading is a certain kind of reading–episodic, but encouraging first thing in the morning. The bathroom is a place where you can go in and pretend to be doing one thing while actually you’re reading. Nobody can interrupt you.”

As Margaret Atwood suggests, I usually keep something episodic or anthologized to read in the bathroom, like a magazine or a short story collection, so that I can savour it a few pages at a time without loosing the thread (unless I’m reading something particularly gripping, or that I need to finish quickly, in which case that follows goes into the bathroom with me). I’ve found Lapham’s Quarterly has done that job wonderfully in the past, because it’s basically a collection of quotations from various sources about a certain subject. By picking up the issue on Celebrity (Winter 2011), for instance, you could be reading a passage from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (“Et tu, Brute?”) during one visit to the loo, and an extract from Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (“Stars are ageless, aren’t they?”) on another.

Recently, however, I’ve been keeping a very special volume at hand: Our Life in Gardens, by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd. The book is halfway between a gardening handbook and a memoir; each chapter is concerned with a particular plant (with beautiful accompanying illustrations by Bobbi Angel) and describes its characteristics and and specific needs, but it also explores any special attachment the authors have to it, like when they started growing it, where they keep it in their garden, and who gave them their first plant. It’s a treasure trove of fascinating trivia about gardening and flowers — especially for someone as poorly versed in the arts of horticulture as I am. For instance, it’s interesting to know that when you eat artichokes (also broccoli and cauliflower), you’re eating the plant’s immature flower buds, or that a biennal is not a plant that flowers every other year, but an annual that takes two years to build up enough root and leaf in order to flower once.

I’ve always found something oddly poetic about botanicals. Maybe it’s the names — both in common and latinized form they sound so beautiful. For example, there’s the “floxglove”, the most common of which is the digitalis purperea, called that way because you will find you finger fits perfectly in one of its cupped flowers. You just have to think of the opening lines of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King to find an example of a list of plant names used to create mesmerizing lyricism and simple precision. There’s definitely something vague and majestic that relates literature to gardening. Robin Lane Fox, classicist and author of such well-respected books as The Classical World and Travelling Heroes, seems to embody that relation; he has also been the gardening columnist for the Financial Times for the last 40 years. “A thoughtful gardener,” Fox explains in a video tour of his Oxfordshire gardens, “thinks carefully about which plant to choose. She then thinks, where shall I put it? What will it go well with? And she thinks above all: What will it like when its in the garden? And as it develops, she looks at it and thinks of a range of associations; maybe it’s come from a great friend, passed down through the family, maybe it’s connected with paintings, art, poetry that one knows. The plant takes on quite a different dimension to your eye.” For instance, the orange flowers tumbling down the gardens steps aren’t just orange flowers for Mr. Fox; they’re hellenium, the hair of Helen of Troy, who started the Trojan war, and, as a classical scholar, he has to have them there in honour of Homer. Talk about living with poetry.

So you now you see the range of wonderful associations and discoveries opened up by a complete embracing of the art of bathroom lit. Who would’ve thought I could skip from Margaret Atwood’s media diet to great book on gardening? That’s why I highly encourage you to live dangerously and try reading something new and exciting next time you lock yourself in the bathroom. A word of warning, however: you may find yourself staying in it for longer than you wanted to.

MULTIPLE SOLITUDES Part 2: Genre & LitFic

China Miéville: Redefining genre fiction. Or maybe just writing damn good stories.

There was an excellent interview with China Miéville, the cult fantasy writer,  in The Guardian couple of weeks ago. The article made quite a big deal of important prejudices against genre fiction, as well as the dangers of genres remaining too insular. I’ve become increasingly aware of this issue in the last few years, partly because I don’t read much so-called genre fiction myself, and also since great things must be happening there too. And there are great things going on, there’s no doubt about it — but are there enough people aware of that? For instance, why did Granta mention Miéville in its 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue, but not include some of his work? Why do the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books never review or mention fantasy or sci-fi books that are just as good as (and, I’m guessing, often better than)  ”mainstream” literary fiction? As Ursula K. Le Guin, the empress of fantasy and sci-fi, would have it: “When he [Miéville] wins the Booker, the whole silly hierarchy will collapse, and literature will be much the better for it.”

But why do genre authors need this kind of recognition? They have their own journals, they have their own prizes (the Nebula, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the Hugo… Miéville has won all of them) Doesn’t that suffice? Are the members of the high brow literati rejecting genre writers on purpose, or are they just trying to cater for another kind of audience? Miéville and other “weird” fiction writers are trying to bring the genre in which they operate somewhere else, in an effort to remove themselves from the cliché of classic orcs-and-goblins fantasy fiction of Tolkien fame. They’re bringing fantasy fiction out of the box, but seeing the criticism the Man Booker Prize has been receiving and the kinds of books that have won it in the past few years, I’m not sure it’s a good thing for these writers to be swimming towards that particular literary establishment. They’re better off letting themselves drift off to more hospitable shores.

Is it useful at all, then, to have genres? Wouldn’t we better off having a giant “fiction” section, encompassing everything from inter-galactic monsters to bodice-ripping highlanders? Let the readers decide among them, so they won’t shy away from books with dragons or cyborgs that they might actually enjoy. The “Literary” sections of bookstores already encompass so many different kinds of books, would it be that much of a stretch? Let’s remember that Margaret Atwood controversially refuses to label her “futuristic” novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, and more recently Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Floor, as science-fiction. She prefers the term “speculative fiction”, because according to her, science-fiction entails “monsters and spaceships” whereas her stories “could really happen.” I wonder: would Oryx and Crake have been shortlisted for the Booker, had it been tagged as Science Fiction? I certainly hope so, but, alarmingly, I’m not a hundred per cent sure. But then, authors are also able to reinvent themselves and skip between genres. Think of Dan Simmons, who has melded poetry and extremely literary content with science fiction elements in his Hyperion Cantos and Ilium series, but has recently delved in the realm of literary horror with novels like The Terror (the story of the Franklin expedition, with a monster), and Drood (a retelling of Dicken’s last years).

The Miéville interview also raises the concept of Literary fiction as an increasingly problematic idea. LitFic, apparently, can be defined as a genre as well, with its own conventions (think Ian McEwan). The problem, according to Miéville, is that LitFic won’t admit to being a genre, and yet asserts its superiority over all other genres. There’s also a massive irony in LitFic being placed above fantasy writing, since the oldest forms of fiction, from Gilgamesh to Beowulf, all have fantastical elements. These kinds of stories are the origins of Western literature, but they’ve recently been relegated to the fringes of fiction. Similarly, the majority of young adult fiction published today combines elements of science-fiction, fantasy, and dystopias. Think Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, or The Hunger Games. But genre is something we grow out of, for some reason — according to Miéville, fantasy writers (and, I suppose, readers) just never do. Or maybe they just don’t get influenced into thinking less of it. The obsession with realism is a fallacy that has remained at the forefront of literary criticism for some time, but it is clearly obsolete as a standard to judge works of fiction.

Last year, Bill Morris wrote a convincing retrospective of Miéville’s work in The Millions. He talks about his own literary education as a reader of “High Brow Rot”, with very few “mainstream” or “genre” books slipping through the literary cracks. Then, Miéville came into Morris’ life, and with his mix of energetic story telling, vivid writing, and engaging worlds, he opened his eyes to whole new worlds. Morris writes: “By the time I finished reading Miéville’s novels I had come to understand that what matters most about fiction is not somebody else’s idea of what’s great, what’s good or, worse yet, what’s good for you. What matters is a writer’s ability to create a world that comes alive through its specifics and then leads us to universal truths. Miéville engages me with his writing because he is brilliant and because he cares about me as a reader, and this, I’ve come to see, is far more precious than a book’s classification, its author’s reputation, or the size of its audience.”

Reviewing all of these statements and what they tell us about the current literary landscape, the only conclusion I can come to is that writers should be praised and rewarded on the basis of good writing, not what they write about — be it time traveling aliens or realistic suburban women.

Old Ladies’ Fiction

Muriel Spark: Older lady extraordinaire.

I’ve recently been working on a personal writing project that involves a number of female characters of a rather advanced age. To inspire myself, I’ve been plunging into a few books in which old ladies figure prominently, in order to see how one goes about writing about them. Old ladies may seem like a little bit bland, as far as subjects go, but I’ve found they can be really instructive, interesting characters, with lots of good stuff hidden away if you know where to look. And, of course, there’s nothing like going to the masters to see how it’s done.

It’s struck me that some authors are very good at writing about old age, while others are really good at doing children. Think of how pitch-perfect Briony is in the first part of Ian McEwan’s  Atonement, as the little girl who sees things and interprets them in her fantasizing, childish mind. The scenes in which Briony interacts with her cousins, the flirty Lola and the twins Pierrot and Jackson, are particularly sharp and witty. A writer who consistently inserts children, usually little girls, in her stories is Elizabeth Bowen. There’s nothing adorable, or even vaguely witty, about her children however; they’re usually eerily quite and observant, and lie on the fringe of the action. With their budding, confused reactions to the world around them, they serve as foils of innocence to the adult characters and their deceits and manipulations.

As for the writers who are good at depicting old age, Alice Munro comes to mind, probably because she’s become a charming old lady herself. Another one is Margaret Atwood, whose careful descriptions of the narrator’s failing, aging body in The Blind Assassin feel so painfully real. The main advantage of writing about an older character is having all these layers to access, because the character has lived through so much. The writer can then delve into the past, these memories and experiences, peeling away the layers in order to reveal meaning. The Blind Assassin, with its layered, russian-doll style storytelling, works in exactly that way. Another book I love about an aging woman is Love, Again by Doris Lessing, which tells the story of a widow in her sixties who falls in love (and the deep, sensual stirrings that involves) all over again. It’s a very beautiful, intense book, which depicts the emotional strain of infatuation and longing vividly, although the story fell away a bit at the end. Lessing is, of course, a fascinating old lady herself, unassuming and frank to the point of bluntness. You’ve only got to see this video of her being told she’s just won the Nobel Prize for literature, in 2008, to see just how charmingly honest she can be. “One can only get as excited as one can get.”

Love, Again's cover has an elegant simplicity and frankness which mirrors both the book, it's author.

One of the old lady novels I read recently is a British classic: Memento Mori, but Muriel Spark. The novel begins most wonderfully with a group of elderly people in London receiving mysterious phone calls. “Remember you must die,” says the voice, and then hangs up. It doesn’t take much else to get the elders fussing and plotting, blackmailing each other and toying with their testaments. What makes the novel interesting is how they all remember or find out about old secrets that had better remain in their dusty cupboards. The novel’s action revolves around the phone calls themselves, but all the reading pleasure comes out of this gossip passed over and picked at by all the characters.  Memento Mori provides a fast-paced, hilarious read, full of insane characters that come to life on the page in all their flawed glory. There are no mild, sweet old ladies letting themselves quietly crumble away here. These women are fighters: “Being over seventy,” one of them remarks, “is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as one a battlefield.” 

I love this vintage cover for Memento Mori. It's just as elegant and fun as the novel itself.

The second book I turned to was Reading in Bed, by Sue Gee, which isn’t really about old women so much as about older women — bright, modern, well-read professionals somewhere in that healthy, comfortable place between middle and old age. Except lots of not so good things are happening to Georgia and Dido, the two friends at the center of the book. One copes with the death of a husband, her narcissistic 20 year old daughter, and a demented old relative out in Sussex; the other with possibly fatal health problems, a husband showing dangerous signs of infidelity, and a daughter in law who refuses to fit in with her “perfect” family. Lots of drama here. So much drama you never really get attached to the characters because so many terrible, moral-quaking things are being thrown at them from all sides. Sue Gee’s prose could saved the book from being disappointing — it’s loud and full of voice, the narrator oddly present and carefully colloquial — except the intrusions become a little bit annoying halfway through, as if the narrator is constantly trying to convince the reader to sympathize for the characters by constantly pitying them. Poor Georgia. Poor Dido. All in all, I think the whole thing didn’t hold together properly because it sounded too soft and desperate. In the end, the story blew away rather uninterestedly. Just like so many things in real life, actually — except novel can’t be too much like real life, or else they wouldn’t be interesting.

Even with a crafted style and a nice title, Reading in Bed wasn't all I thought it would be. Too bad. The cover is pretty feminine, however; maybe I wasn't the target audience.