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!

Nothing but the Truth

A Widow's Story is the memoir Joyce Carol Oates wrote after losing her husband. What the book doesn't mention is that 13 months after her husband's death, Oates remarried. The question is: does it matter?

I should’ve mentioned Joyce Carol Oates in last week’s post about rapid book writing; Oates is well known — legendary, even — for her amazing productivity. Since the 1960s, she has published over 50 novels and 20 short story collections, and more than a dozen books non-fiction. And were talking about a serious, literary author (whatever that means), Oates doesn’t write trash; she has been nominated for and has won several highly respectable awards, like the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the O. Henry prize. In February 2008, Oates lost her husband of 47 years, Raymond Smith, who was an editor and publisher. Her last book, A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, details the months of acute pain and grieving she went through after her husband’s sudden death. The book was received tepidly by critics, and many of them latched on to a fact which they found immensely important: 11 months after Oates’ husband died, she was engaged to Charles Gross, a neuroscientist, whom she married in 2009. A Widow’s Story, published three years after her husband’s death, doesn’t mention her remarriage at all. 

In an illuminating article in The Millions, “Grief, the Cruel and Fickle Muse”, Bill Morris reviews A Widow’s Story by putting it into context with other so-called grief memoirs, like Joan Didion’s acclaimed A Year of Magical Thinking and Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf’s The Journey Not the Arrival Matters (his fifth volume of memoirs, which covers 1939 to 1969 — Virginia committed suicide in 1941). Morris remarks that the fact Oates doesn’t mention her remarriage in A Widow’s Story is a “major — and fatal — ommission.” He adds, a bit harshly, that Oates “has written the most dishonest kind of book there is – one that purports to serve up raw emotions but doesn’t have the discipline to stick to the facts or the honesty to reveal the most basic of truths.” In his review of Oates’ memoir for The New York Review of Books, ”For Sorrow There is Not Remedy”, Julian Barnes reaches a similar conclusion. He states that “there is something unhappy in the omission”. Barnes does not question Oates’s morals — if she is now happily married again, so be it —, he only suggests that “some readers will feel they have a good case for breach of narrative promise” in Oates’ selected, sanitized version of events.

JCO and her late husband, Raymond Smith, in 1972. Photo credits: Bernard Gotfryd, via Guardian.co.uk/books

Should knowing about Oates’ remarriage, something that isn’t included in the book, change the way we see and judge that book? I don’t have an answer to that question. The critics above, and some others, certainly think so. Joyce Carol Oates clearly thought not. She’s written in response of Barnes’ article, defending herself by explaining that A Widow’s Story “was not meant to be an autobiographical work, which would include many, many developments in the memoirist’s life subsequent to the early experience of widowhood, but rather an intimately detailed account of the raw, early weeks and months of ‘widowhood’”. Oates does not see her remarriage as relevant to a story that she wanted to be essentially about her intense experience of grief, because her new union having come to exist after the fact doesn’t change the intensity of that grief as it was being experienced. And yet, according to Bill Morris, Oates mentions in her memoir “that it took her a year and a half to erase her husband’s voice from their telephone answering machine”, by which time she was married to Charles Gross. Clearly, her book does leave the immediacy of experience and moves on to her (at least partial, as far as these things go) recovery. Oates’ has been a little bit naïve in thinking no one would make a remark about her omission, although perhaps she couldn’t foresee that critics would make such a big deal out of it.

The English world of letters probably has an issue with books that appear as memoirs but render only half-truths or blurred realities. James Frey was famously punished in public by Oprah, and all of her devotees, for having substantially exaggerated facts in his memoir of addiction A Million Little Pieces. The French, on the contrary, have made a veritable genre — auto-fiction — out of exaggerating their lives to make interesting books. Writers like Emmanuel Carrère and Catherine Millet do it all the time, except it’s written “récit“, not “autobiographie“, under the titles, and they get shelved with the novels. Memoirs, in English, are shelved with the biographies, are that means they’re non-fiction.

JCO and her new husband, Charles Gross. Photo credits: newyorksocialdiary.com

What Barnes calls “the narrative promise” is the pact that exists between writer and reader that whatever will be in the book is the truth, and nothing but the truth. But then, can the writer decide what is part of that truth? It’s her life, after all. It’s her memoir. She can recount events as she remembers them, as she wants to tell them, can’t she? It probably should be that way, but the rules of honesty and ownership are different in the world of publication. Readers like twists, and they like to know about things that may or may not be related directly with the content of what they’re reading. Does the fact that J. K. Rowling lost her mother, suffered from depression, and lived on welfare support  in the 90s change anything to the quality of the Harry Potter books? Probably not, but it certainly changes the way we understand the series within its broader context, and makes its success all the more impressive. 

Oates finishes her response to the NYRB with the following statement: “However, since nothing seems to arouse reproach in reviewers quite so much as the possibility that the memoirist is less miserable at the time of the writing and afterward than she was at the time of the experience about which she is writing, it is only sensible to include an appendix to remedy this, which I will hope to do.” It’s not an excuse or an assertive defense, only a half-hearted submission to the pressures of criticism. I don’t know if she’ll be doing the right thing in adding this “appendix” to subsequent editions, if she ever does, but she’ll certainly be doing what is expected of her. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that’s the way it works; writers remains slaves to their readers.