1.
William Giraldi spent more than half of his 2008
review (pdf) of
Cary Holladay’s A Fight in the Doctor’s Office considering the etymology of “novella,” identifying the history and characteristics of the form, and suggesting essential writers. He claims that the demands of character development are one way to separate novellas from novels, noting that Gustave Aschenbach in
Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice does not require the 800 pages necessary for the titular character of
Tom Jones by
Henry Fielding. Giraldi’s introductory thoughts seem like a rather long preface to evaluate a work of new fiction under 150 pages. Such an observation is not meant as criticism. To write about novellas is to engage in a form of literary apologia. Giraldi’s approach is the norm. Most reviews of novellas begin with similar elements: the writer’s arbitrary word count parameter, why “novella” sounds more diminutive than “short novel,” and a lament that publishers are unwilling to support the form.
This essay is not such an apology. I am tired of threnodies. Writers of novellas have nothing to be sorry about. Novellas deserve critical attention as individual, not adjacent, works. We might begin by mining appreciative notes rather than simply cataloging criticisms. Tucked between Giraldi’s prefatory critical observations in “The Novella’s Long Life” are notes of admiration: “an expert novella combines the best of a short story with the best of a novel, the dynamic thighs of a sprinter with the long-distance lungs of a mountaineer.” He continues a critical tradition whose modern genesis might have been the novella-loving 1970s, when even novels were short; think
The Sporting Club and
Ninety-Two in the Shade by
Thomas McGuane, or
A Good Day to Die by
Jim Harrison. In a 1972 essay he would later develop into
a book,
Robert J. Clements considers the oral tradition behind the novella form as helping him “define its length as long enough for a dry split birch log to be consumed by a blazing bivouac fire.” That image was still popping in 1977, when
Graham Good, in the journal
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, almost elevates the novella beyond the novel, noting that the shorter work often focuses on “simple natural or preternatural exigencies: apparitions, cataclysms like great storms or earthquakes, and individual declines or deaths.” Of course novels also contain deaths, but it’s the speed and tension that matters: the “novella is a closed form whose end is latent in its beginning: there is usually some initial indication that the end is known, and this enhances the narrative art of holding in suspense what it is.”
Fast-forward to very recent memory. At
The Daily Beast in 2010,
Taylor Antrim considers the focus on novellas by presses such as Melville House and New Directions, and the publication of the “wispy thin”
Point Omega by
Don DeLillo and
Walks With Men by
Ann Beattie, as proving that the form is in “pretty healthy shape.” Citing works as diverse as “The Dead” by
James Joyce and
Shoplifting from American Apparel by
Tao Lin, Antrim claims that “novellas are often structurally syncopated...their effect tends to be not instantaneous but cumulative.”
In “The Three-Day Weekend Plan,” from the 2011 anthology
The Late American Novel,
John Brandon offers a tongue-in-cheek suggestion: hoard your novella. Best to “downplay the novella in casual conversation,” and instead keep the form to “ourselves, the adults.” The novella is a personal document, something that will “let us find out, in the writing, how we truly write.” Work to keep in a closet or desk drawer, “away from any and all publishing apparatus.”
In “Notes on the Novella,” published that same year in
Southwest Review,
Tony Whedon waxes lyric about the form: “novellas are not so much told as dreamed aloud; they inhabit a realm of half-shapes and shadowy implication.” Historically, they “[thrive] on travel and adventure and [are] often set in exotic climes.” Whedon stresses the need for control, and uses language that mimics
John Gardner’s oft-quoted definition of the form: all “subplots need subordinating to their main storyline.” That control, in the formal sense, enables time and tense shifts. That temporal compression increases tension and pacing, resulting in a “swirly and gunky” effect. Novellas are “implosive, impacted, rather than explosive and expansive.” I read this as novellas refract rather than reflect. They are something shaken, but not spilled.
“
The Return of the Novella, the Original #Longread” by
Jon Fassler appeared last year at
The Atlantic. Fassler laments that novellas are tucked into short story collections as an afterward, or packaged with other novellas to be “sold as a curiosity.” Although Fassler’s piece is primarily a profile of Melville House’s success with re-issuing older works in their “Art of the Novella” series, he concludes that “a renaissance in the mid-length non-fiction” form, the “journalistic equivalent of the novella,” is enabled because of electronic editions.
Upon the release of his 2012 novel
Sweet Tooth, in which a character publishes a novella,
Ian McEwan quipped a series of imagined critical reactions to the short form in
The New Yorker: “Perhaps you don’t have the necessary creative juice. Isn’t the print rather large, aren’t the lines too widely spaced? Perhaps you’re trying to pass off inadequate goods and fool a trusting public.” McEwan confidently calls the novella the “perfect form of prose fiction,” citing a “long and glorious” lineage: Mann,
James,
Kafka,
Conrad,
Camus,
Voltaire,
Tolstoy, Joyce,
Solzhenitsyn,
Orwell,
Steinbeck,
Pynchon,
Melville,
Lawrence, and
Munro.
A few weeks earlier, at that year’s Cheltenham Festival, McEwan claimed that he “would die happy” if he “could write the perfect novella.” Although he worries the form is unseemly for publishers and critics, readers love that they could “hold the whole thing structurally in your mind at once.” Inverting the typical criticism, McEwan claims that the “novel is too capacious, inclusive, unruly, and personal for perfection. Too long, sometimes too much like life.” In sarcastic response,
Toby Clements at The Telegraph thinks that McEwan is “lucky to be allowed to publish novellas.” Clements quotes
Philip Rahv, who says that the novella form “demands compositional economy, homogeneity of conception, concentration in the analysis of character, and strict aesthetic control.” Returning to McEwan, Clements considers the foolishness of word and page count definitions. At 166 pages,
On Chesil Beach was considered a novella by McEwan, but a short novel by the Booker prize judges. Giraldi notes that “Adultery” by
Andre Dubus is identified as a short story in one collection, and a novella in another. I would add
Wise Blood by
Flannery O’Connor to that list. I have defaulted to italics appropriate for a short novel, but many consider the work a novella. Confusion, idiosyncrasy, beauty: welcome to the world of the novella.
2.
While charting the lineage of novella discussions is worthwhile, as a writer of the form I am most interested in application. Perhaps the most writer-friendly treatment in recent memory is “Revaluing the Novella” by
Kyle Semmel from the December 2011 issue of
The Writer’s Chronicle. Rather than formal comparison, Semmel focuses on what successful novellas contain. Like Giraldi and Whedon, Semmel applies John Gardner’s definition of a novella, as explicated in
The Art of Fiction. He supports Gardner’s claim that novellas move through a series of small climaxes. Semmel rightly stresses the “series” element of the definition. The mode of the novella is athletic, forward-leaning.
Gardner splits his definition to contain three modes of novellas: single stream, non-continuous stream, and pointillist. The nomenclature might be idiosyncratic, but Gardner’s criticism was always homegrown. Semmel adds to Gardner’s discussion: often novellas contain “resolution; there is closure.” He admits that the point might sound obvious, but it stresses that novellas are not meant to be top-heavy or flimsy. A necessary point to make, as even Antrim, an admirer of novellas, claims that the form “has ambivalence built into its DNA...[it] serves up irresolute endings.”
Semmel considers a range of examples, from “Voices from the Moon” by Andre Dubus to
Black Water by
Joyce Carol Oates. He also considers “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” by
William H. Gass, but quickly dismisses the work as a “gangly prose poem” of more interest to “literary scholars” than readers. My literary heart sunk. I have loved Gass’s longer novella, “The Pedersen Kid,” ever since it was recommended to me by novelist
Tom Bailey, while I was an undergraduate at Susquehanna University. Bailey thought novellas were defined by time—a season or a weekend—and Gass’s piece was offered as an example.
Gardner devotes several sentences to that longer-titled, shorter work, but spends pages explaining why “The Pedersen Kid” is “a more or less perfect example of the [novella] form.” It is important to note that Gardner stressed not only the stream of climaxes, but that they were “increasingly intense.” Yet what interests me most is Gardner’s further qualification that these climaxes are “symbolic and ritualistic.”
It should not be surprising that Gardner loves this novella: Gardner published it in 1961 in his magazine,
MSS. Gass’s novella nabbed the magazine thirty charges of obscenity, one of which, co-editor
LM Rosenberg shares, was “‘nape,’ as in neck.” Federal fines caused the magazine to fold after three issues, but Gardner never stopped appreciating the novella. His summary of the plot: “In some desolate, rural landscape . . . in the dead of winter, a neighbor’s child, the Pedersen kid, arrives and is discovered almost frozen to death near Jorge’s father’s barn; when he’s brought in and revived, he tells of the murderer at his house, a man with yellow gloves; Big Hans and Pa decide to go there, taking young Jorge; when they get there, Jorge, making a dash from the barn to the house, hears shots; Big Hans and Pa are killed, apparently -- Jorge is not sure -- and Jorge slips inside the house and down cellar, where at the end of the novella he is still waiting.”
I reread the novella each winter. I also revisit Gass’s preface to the collection, which explains the composition of “The Pedersen Kid.” He “began by telling a story to entertain a toothache.” Such a story must contain “lots of incident, some excitement, much menace.” After weeks of writing he “began to erase the plot to make a fiction of it.” He “tried to formulate a set of requirements for the story as clear and rigorous as those of the sonnet.” He cast away a focus on theme for devotion to the “necessity for continuous revision, so that each word would seem simply the first paragraph rewritten, swollen with sometimes years of scrutiny around that initial verbal wound.”
“The Pedersen Kid” was planned end-first, with all action “subordinated” toward “evil as a visitation -- sudden, mysterious, violent, inexplicable.” It was “an end I could aim at. Like death.” And yet, also like death, “I did not know how I would face it.” He imagined the book as a work of visual art: “the physical representation must be spare and staccato; the mental representation must be flowing and a bit repetitious; the dialogue realistic but musical. A ritual effect is needed. It falls, I think, into three parts, each part dividing itself into three.” Three also correlates to the story’s main characters -- Jorge, Big Hans, and Pa -- who enter the blizzard to find the Pedersen’s abandoned home. Although Whedon does not consider Gass’s work in his essay, it fits one of his theses that symbols in novellas “present themselves orchestrally in the form of leitmotifs that dovetail with disparate time sequences to create a strong over-arching moral theme: hence the novella’s connection with allegory.”
Gass’s novella contains extended spaces between words, which
John Madera calls “caesuras,” and
Samuel Delany thinks are “actual suspensions of sound.” Gass says that he “wanted pages that were mostly white. Snow.” He practiced typographical and pictorial experimentation in another novella,
Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. The novella form is short enough to be both art and artifice. Experimentation does not become exhausting.
The novella is ritual: for Gardner, for Gass, for Whedon, for me, but for others?
3.
Despite claims about the paucity of options, writers continue to draft and publish novellas in literary magazines and as standalone books.
Big Fiction, At Length, A Public Space, PANK, New England Review, Seattle Review, Glimmer Train, and
The Long Story have published novella-length work;
The Missouri Review included one of my favorites, “Bearskin” by
James A. McLaughlin.
Ploughshares Solos releases novellas as single e-books.
Miami University Press and
Quarterly West have revived their novella contests.
Iron Horse Literary Review holds an annual chapbook contest that publishes a novella-length work during select years.
Texas Review Press has its own annual contest, the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. Readers and writers of speculative fiction continue to embrace the novella form. Consider
Ted Chieng,
Jason Sanford, and
Kij Johnson; not to mention the nominees for the annual Hugo Award for Best Novella. The most recent winner was
Brandon Sanderson, for
The Emperor’s Soul.
Deena Drewis founded Nouvella, a press devoted solely to novellas, in 2011. Drewis initially considered works as low as 10,000 words, but became worried that some readers would consider such standalone books as “long short [stories].” She admits that defining a novella is difficult, and instead uses the work of Andre Dubus, Jim Harrison, and Alice Munro as formal affirmations.
At 4 x 6 inches, Nouvella books can feel too bulky beyond 40,000 words, so form requires practical function. Her longest release,
The Sensualist by
Daniel Torday, “occupies more temporal space” than her other books. Torday told Drewis the work had originally been a novel, but she received the manuscript “pared down to its working limbs. It doesn’t feel compacted the way a short story is often a work of compression, but it also doesn’t take the liberty of meandering, like a novel sometimes does.”
Nouvella’s stated mission is to “find writers that we believe have a bright and dedicated future in front of them, and who have not yet signed with a major publisher.” She finds that the form is “a good point of entry for readers to discover emerging authors.” If readers enjoy a short story from a new writer, they need to do the legwork to find other stories, “or wait until a collection comes out, but that requires a good deal of dedication and perseverance.” Instead, a novella “allows you to spend a little more time inside the author’s head, and because it’s a stand-alone book, it demands more attention from the reader. It’s also not a novel, which for readers, can seem like a big commitment.”
Drewis is prescient: Daniel Torday's debut novel,
The Last Flight of Poxl West, will be published in 2015 by St. Martin's Press. Such evolution is not exclusive to Nouvella.
Andrew Ervin’s Extraordinary Renditions, a collection of three novellas from Coffee House Press, preceded his forthcoming debut novel,
Burning Down George Orwell's House.
Mark Doten, who acquired Ervin’s title for Soho Press, notes that “having a strong favorable opinion” of Ervin’s shorter work “was certainly a factor [but not the only one]...in that book going to the top of my reading pile.”
Of course writers are not simply drawn to the novella form for its exposure opportunities.
Tim Horvath has always written fiction “on the long side...[before he] knew a thing about word counts and literary journals and what they were looking for.” “Bridge Poses,” his 9,000 word story, was published in
New South, yet he was unable to publish another, longer work,
Circulation, in literary magazines. An editor at AGNI, while encouraging, "warned that it would be difficult to publish in a journal because of its length."
Bradford Morrow, the editor of
Conjunctions, wrote some paragraphs in support of the work, and that convinced Horvath to remain with the piece. Sunnyoutside Press ultimately released the novella as a book, and Horvath appreciated how the story’s manageable length meant that the work's “cartographic and library obsessions” could be “echo[ed] throughout the design elements of the book.”
Horvath is drawn to “stories that feel as though they encompass multitudes, that take their sweet time getting going, that have a leisurely confidence in themselves, that manage nonetheless to feel urgent, their scale necessary.” That macro approach can be compared with
Peter Markus, whose novella collection,
The Fish and the Not Fish, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books: “every word in this new collection is monosyllabic, [and] you would maybe think that such limitation would limit such things as the length of the piece, how much can and can't be done, how long such a project might be sustained. The interesting thing here is that the restriction worked the other way. The river flowed up the mountain, so to speak.” Markus has always been interested in “short novels or long stories” like
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, “The Pedersen Kid,”
Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness,
Kerouac’s Visions of Gerard, and the novellas of Jim Harrison.
The novella form’s length afforded Horvath and Markus a particular sense of control over structure and presentation. The same approach might be applied to
The Mimic’s Own Voice by
Tom Williams, which he viewed as a “parody of an academic essay.” After he published a story in
Main Street Rag, the journal’s publisher,
M. Scott Douglass, approached Williams about being a part of the press’s new novella series. The form matched the writer: Williams wonders who would not appreciate “fiction that equally borrows the short story’s precision and the novel’s potency.” Williams uses the same word as Gardner — “perfection” — to describe the unique tightness of novellas, citing his list of favorites:
Cataclysm Baby by
Matt Bell,
Nothing in the World by
Roy Kesey,
Honda by
Jessica Treat,
Seize the Day by
Saul Bellow,
Sula by
Toni Morrison, and
Goodbye Columbus by
Philip Roth.
My own forthcoming novella,
This Darksome Burn, began as an experimental, long story; early readers thought it a one-act play. I expanded the manuscript to a novel, reaching 300 pages, but was unsatisfied. Subplots upon subplots had blurred the central narrative. I started-over a year later. I turned the manuscript into a pitch, treatment, and finally a film script. Thought was subverted to action. Everything existed on the page. The script became a novella, and
Erin Knowles McKnight, my editor and publisher at Queen’s Ferry Press, suggested I switch to present tense, which allowed me to increase the story’s immediacy. My dark story about an overprotective father in the shadow of the Siskiyou Mountains had found its form: a novella. I had found my form: I placed a novella about opium traffickers and atomic bomb scientists in
storySouth, and another novella about a defrocked priest is coming from CCM Press in 2015.
I have practical and ritual reasons for being drawn to novellas. I am the father of five-month-old twin girls, and my writing is done in bursts, late at night. I spend my days living—preparing bottles, changing diapers, writing reviews, teaching, having lunch duty in my high school’s cafeteria, mowing the lawn, and watching my girls grow—but the cadences of story remain like a faint metronome. My old office will become a playroom for the twins, so I have migrated to a smaller room downstairs, the walls lined with books, and, proper to my Italian Catholic sensibility, a cross above the doorframe. I close the door, and in a small space, within a small page amount, I try to write stories that stretch their invisible seams. I love novellas. That doesn’t mean I won’t attempt a novel, or short stories, or essays, or poems. But my heart is set on that form that feels both mysterious and manageable. No apologies needed for that.
Did Amy Stewart have to “retrospectively empower” Constance Kopp to make her a law enforcement pioneer, appointed the first female undersheriff of Bergen County, N.J., in 1915? Not a bit. Kopp’s cases were well-documented in the newspapers of the day, and Stewart has woven her stories into three novels so far: Girl Waits with Gun, Lady Cop Makes Trouble, and the upcoming Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions. Kopp was quoted by a reporter as saying “Some women prefer to stay at home and take care of the house. Let them. There are plenty who like that kind of work enough to do it. Others want something to do that will take them out among people and affairs. A woman should have the right to do any sort of work she wants to, provided she can do it.” Ahead of her time, yes, but still someone who made her way within it.
Stewart was a non-fiction writer before she was a novelist, and sticks close to the known facts with her novels, but that’s far from the only approach. On the more fictional end of the spectrum is Kate Quinn’s new novel The Alice Network. Its historical kernel is a real-life World War I spy ring run by and consisting of women, named for its leader, whose code name was Alice Dubois. Quinn interlaces the war story with a second timeline, this one centered on a fictional, pregnant protagonist searching for a lost cousin. Quinn’s book offers an unusually entertaining way to examine how women, both ordinary and extraordinary, are called upon to act in the world during wartime.
Naturally, the historical novels it’s easiest to recognize as feminist are those written about women who explicitly fought for women’s rights and women’s issues, like Terrible Virtue, written by Ellen Feldman about reproductive rights pioneer Margaret Sanger. Similarly, novels that center on women adjacent to more famous men—Rodin’s Lover by Heather Webb (artist Camille Claudel) or The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict (physicist Mileva Maric)—argue without stating outright that in a fairer world, these lesser-known female subjects would be as famous and renowned as their better-known partners. Biographies can make these arguments too, but fiction puts us there in the moment, breathing and crying and cheering with these women. Paula McLain, whose biographical historical novels The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun are some of the best-known in the genre, was quoted in Vanity Fair as saying “We love to learn about history, but don’t we love to get close to it?”
Returning to Mantel for a moment, she takes issue with “women writers who want to write about women in the past,” implying that male writers are in some other category, possibly exempt from the “persistent difficulty” of wanting to write female characters of action and agency. But it’s hard to think of a book that takes its heroine’s part more wholeheartedly than Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night, which is by turns rip-roaring, tragic, giddy, dramatic, and delightful, but never loses its keen awareness that its extraordinary heroine, soprano Lilliet Berne, operates within the constraints of a man’s world. Her fate is changed at every turn by men’s decisions, men’s gifts, men’s egos, men’s wars. And her journey is all the more riveting because of it. Chee’s heroine was inspired by real-life opera singer Jenny Lind, known as “The Swedish Nightingale”; Lilliet Berne is fictional. But this is what the best historical novels do—blend fact and fiction in a way that sweeps us into the world of the past and informs our experience of the present.
Good points made.There are plenty of women from the past who did all sorts of things on which to base stories.Many have been forgotten and need to be rediscovered and written about.Feminist treasure trove of subject matter!
Philipa Gregory has written many wonderful epics of British history from the woman’s POV. I highly recommend them.
It is true in history some women have been autonomous and brave, but when one considers that women in the West have only had the vote for a mere century, Mantel’s comment is put in context. I think a lot of the essay’s examples to refute Mantel’s statements are (to me) “cosy” fiction. When you look at the big picture of women in history, it would be difficult to find any political period where women had voices. I think Mantel’s statement is correct.
An excellent article
I think there’s a fairly substantive problem here. It’s not only feminism. The problem is with almost all historical fiction – people in the past did not think like we do. The way they did think is in many ways fundamentally opposed to us at basic levels. When you’re trying to use a historical character to try to make them dance to our tunes, it so often rings false – not only in the historic sense, but also fictional sense.
What we tend to do is assume that people in the past were just stupid, for lack of better words. But – not only is that false – it’s often true that many historic persons or eras had as good or even better understandings of themselves than we do of ourselves. Examples: how many people write stuff set in the late Middle Ages (basically portraying them as effectively barbarians) when they themselves are not smart enough to understand the extremely sophisticated philosophy, writing, symbolism and religion of the time? How many current writers are simply too dumb to understand even basic textbooks of that time (people forget that things like Aquinas’ Summa or Peter Lombard’s Sentences were introductory textbooks for beginners, not advanced texts at all.)
Kind of like “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”. L.P. Hartley, author of the outstanding novel “The Go Between”.
I listened to Hilary Mantel’s comments, quoted in this piece, as part of her Reith Lecture talks. I was rooting for Hilary, whom I admire, while also feeling she was in the awkward position of defending her trade in a way that writers of contemporary fiction generally aren’t required to do. In Britain, there is a divide between literary fiction (respectable) and populist fiction (not respectable). Historical fiction, even that of a literary tone, slides by default into the ‘not-respectable’ category. Ms Mantel vigorously defended her right to write historical fiction without being questioned, or downgraded. She gave brisk shrift to a professional historian (respectable) who tried to imply that her historical perspective was inevitably second-rate for being fictional. If I understood her response, she believes that her work delivers reality and truth to readers, by another means.
Can historical novelists be feminist? I am one, and when I’m asked if I’m a feminist reply ‘Of course I am. All women who think are feminists.’ (I developed this response to checkmate the men who liked to say ‘My wife isn’t a feminist, she doesn’t feel the need to be.’) But I digress. My personal brief when writing my commercial historical novels (not respectable, sadly) is that the era in which they are set dictates the moral atmosphere. Victorian females did not generally kick people’s backsides and demand careers. Yet many of them were pioneers, travellers and business women. Their struggle to be so IS the story. My own female forebears raised families through war and grinding poverty. It’s unlikely they’d have thought of themselves as feminists as the concept was a rarefied one at the time. I think of them as sisters, and their lives worthy of scrutiny. We living in the second millenium can learn much from them and if our learning is through fiction, then more power to the genre. In a hundred years time, someone might look at my life, or yours, and use it as the inspiration of a novel.
Natalie Meg Evans – excellent comment. When I think of women who kicked ass, I think of Gertrude Bell, Mary Kingsley and Florence Nightingale, for example, and other explorers who were not afraid to satisfy and induldge their curiosity with the intent to help society and not to colonize it. These are women I aspire to emulate, if only I were brave enough. Regarding Mantel, 8 months on Gaza Street and A Place of Greater Safety, show how women can write historical fiction with empathy, yet without sentimentality. Rose Tremain does a great job with historical fiction as well. Highly literary and without “pandering” to women readers. Pandering is in quotations because I despise that word, used by some male writers regarding fiction that interests women, in the most obnoxious and condescending way.
Historical fiction can certainly be feminist and there are many ways to make it so. However, one of the most effective ways is to allow your female lead to tell the story. I like first person narratives because they allow you into an internal world and to make the voice female gives the narrative a distinctly female point of view.
With historical fiction the external details may be historically accurate, however what fiction enables you to do is to present the constants in new ways and challenge accepted interpretations – particularly useful in giving women of history back their voices so that women of today and tomorrow won’t risk losing them in the first place.