Some Words

For this post, I’m going to be using the word novella to stand in for a story of between 20 and 60 thousand words.

Novellas are the ghetto of writing. Unless you are already famous enough to get stuff published by name alone, or you are writing children’s fiction, it’s going to be hard. And still, I think that novellas are what many people should be focusing on.

My first reason for feeling this way is a personal one. I don’t read very quickly. There are a lot of novels out there, and you’re never going to get around to reading them all, or even all of the cream of the crop. In such a situation, there is a faint arrogance to the act of writing a novel of great length. By doing so, you are saying that your words do not merely justify my reading them, but they justify my not reading someone else’s words. Now, to a degree this is true for any novel, but long novels just seem to flaunt it.

I’m going to pick on Underworld, by Delillo, as I think it is the poster child for bloated arrogance. My edition of the novel is over 800 very large pages long. In those 800 pages Delillo makes a desperate play to cram all of America into one book. Can you think of something more doomed to failure? The reader jumps from person to person with no rhyme or reason. Sometimes you get something just to have a moment that was important to history. None of the characters were involved in it? Just add another character! You don’t need to come back to him. I’d give a perfunctory plot synopsis, but no such thing is possible. On top of it all the end clearly exposes Delillo as having no grasp of the internet, and how one can write about it.

It has moments of brilliance in it. There are a few scenes of truly amazing power, but the amount of shit you have to wade through to get them is amazing. It reads like he was trying to write a parody of Pynchon and then forgot it was a parody about one hundred pages in. He has enough material for four of five books with actual plots, but instead he chooses to give me dozens of “slices of life.”

How does this relate to the novella? A novella is long enough to have a plot with a twist or two, some character development, and a setting for the reader to settle into. Despite this, it can be read in a day or two by a dedicated reader. It does not claim so much time for the reader that they are burdened by it. When I get bogged down in a very long novel, it tends to slow or stop my reading on all fronts. When I read a novella, I’m through it in a day or two and then I’m on to the next author. If I really liked the novella? I read another one by the author.

I’ll put it a little more explicitly, a novella and a novel are both thought of as “books.” People sit down to read a book, not a novel or novella. That book is thought of as a concrete unit of experience. Very few novels of significant length net greater or lesser emotional results than novellas.

To illustrate, The Great Gatsby is an excellent example of a book in the short novel or long novella range, which is of undeniable quality. It is tightly plotted and gives up nothing in structure to larger works. Despite it’s emotional impact, symbolism, and social commentary, it does not demand of its reader a great deal of time. Is it better or worse than the Brother’s Karamazov? On grounds of literature, it would be pointless to argue, but in terms of investment, Gatsby has the advantage, because it demands less of your time.

Next up: Novellas Part II – Novellas and Genre Fiction

This is turning into a three or four parter…