Some Words

As someone who has, for some time, been trying to write in long form prose. I have had a good deal of time to consider the relative merits of longer and shorter novels. Granted, there are plenty of people in this boat with me, but it’s my blog, so if you’re reading, you’re reading my view on this.

It takes less time to write a novella than a novel. Unless you are prone to writer’s block, or general paralysis and fear, when it comes to your fiction. You will be able to turn out a novella much faster than you will be able to squeeze out a novel. It’s a pity that an industry that once published large quanities of the former, now turns out mostly the later.

The novella was a form that was well suited to the dime novel era, low cost to produce, and thus relatively low risk. It was consumed by the reader in short order, and could be produced by an author of moderate to good skill in little time. Agatha Christy managed to churn out quite of few of them, for example. Each one was a tightly plotted and economical with words. This has its strengths and weaknesses of course. But it allowed her to create a situation in which she got those who liked her work to toss in more money very frequently. My father once told me that they had an old advertising slogan back in the day, “a Christy for Christmas.”

Now, Christy is perhaps a bad example, as she was so successful. Writing in a certain form will certainly not guarantee success. Philip K. Dick was certainly not financially successful, despite churning out books at quite a clip. Dick was also a little inconsistent. His sanity/drug issues, which helped propel his writing, made some of his novels… less than excellent reading.

Novellas were mostly the realm of mass market, with little intent spent on making them high art, as least from the publisher’s perspective. The high volume and low cost made them less of a risk. Like the movie industry, the publishing industry has shifted more to the blockbuster approach, which rewards phenomenons more than it does hard workers. This is exacerbated by seemingly absurd internal issues. Random House, for example, allowed its internal publishing houses to bid against each other on advances for authors. This artificially raised the advance, and thus the risk to the publisher, which in turn made it less likely to take a risk on new or marginal author.

I’m not prone to believing in golden ages, and I’d be willing to bet that there are just as many, if not more, novel readers than there were 50 years ago. But as I said all those weeks ago in the first post about novellas, there is a lot of stuff out there vying for there attention. Mysteries of Pittsburgh, just to pick a quick example, benefited from being relatively short. That low bar of entry helped get a new novelist an audience (being mistakenly identified as an up and coming gay author apparently didn’t hurt either).

And where did all of this come from? I had been writing one day, and suddenly was worried that some part of me was trying to write “the next great American novel.” It had gotten big, and sprawling, and at the time looked dangerously close to getting out of my control. A shorter novel sounded like something I could write quickly, and then work over and over until it was just right. It sounded almost relaxing, and then I remembered how out of favor novellas had fallen.

Yesterday, shortly after getting up, I finished The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I would probably have finished the night before, but my eyes were starting to hurt, it kept me going a little past that, but only just. Chabon at some point, I’m not sure when, vaulted into the position of “American writer who’s prodigious talents I most envy.”

Union is a fairly textbook noir, with a little flourish thrown in. It takes place in a fictional world, where instead of Jerusalem, the Jews got a part of Alaska after WWII. There used to be an essay on Chabon’s site, which I can’t find anymore, that detailed a book he had found called “Say it in Yiddish!” from the old Say It series of language manuals. In the essay he talks about the world in which Yiddish would actually be spoken as a still vibrant tongue. Now he has taken the time to create it.

The book feels like Chandler to me, with a slightly less convoluted plot. Of course the two authors have different ways of putting words together, but I like both of them, so I’m more than happy to be reading Chabon. In it, down and out detective Landsman must solve the murder he’s been told to give up on, before his life, and jurisdiction, come crashing down around him. The Jews are about to get kicked out of Alaska, and Landsman has no idea where he’s going to land.

Oddly enough, the thing that gave me the most pleasure reading this book was the way that Chabon introduced characters. There’s a way that the old pulps brought characters on, with just a little too much text. The characters are over the top, before they even open their mouths. Even the people who are wasting their lives are wasting them at an incredible clip. I love that feeling with pulp fiction.

And I would be lying to say I wasn’t biased. It’s not just that I love Chabon. There’s a part of me that feels a little better more calm about all the mitzvahs I’m failing to do. On some weird level I feel like reading Chabon is remedial Judaism. Like My Name is Asher Lev I feel better about not being a black hat, just by reading about the occasional black hat. I told a friend at work that he might not get the same thing out of the book that I do. Now he’s telling me that I might not get the same thing out of Mysteries of Pittsburgh, because I’m not bi-curious.

As the novel moves on, you get a little taste of the various Jewish communities that have moved to Alaska, and more than a little chess. Chabon thanks Nabakov for a chess problem in the author’s note. There’s another essay from his site… about Pale Fire, which someone borrowed from me and never returned, the bum. In this essay, Chabon talks about the need to use rare words. This ends up causing my one big complaint. There are a few times, say three, that Chabon seems to be trying to dig a word out of obscurity. Nabakov finds words that somehow seem essential, no matter how obscure. The words Chabon tries to do this to feel forced. But if That’s what I’m complaining about, that should say something.

At any rate, Jewish or not, Chabon takes you on a ride, builds a world with tantalizing hints, but not a complete picture of the whole, and leaves you at the end feeling like it’s a solid ending. That’s another thing I envy him for. His endings feel like endings. I’m always amazed by how few authors can do that.

After being Mr. Mean to Delillo about Underworld, it’s comforting to see his latest novel being received with a resounding ‘meh.’ The Guardian digested version does little to up the excitement. I mentioned this to Colin the other day, and he seem less than inspired to read. What does it say when the reviews make the book feel like a rehash of a rehash?

From the digest of the new work:

Memory, matter, age. Every-thing was pixellating into abstraction.

From Underworld:

All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborn form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders, and stray yawns, the sand-grain mannyness of things that can’t be counted.
It is all falling indelibly into the past.

P.S. If you aren’t reading the Bookslut blog, and thus realizing what a stinking cheat I’m being with this post, you’re missing out.

Edit: Actually, now that I’ve had a moment with those two quotes, I think they play nicely against each other.

All my life I’ve made a habit of starting to do more than I know I can handle. It’s not hard to forsee that this will have mixed results. And so, amid a miriad of projects, posting fell to the wayside. And now, suddenly, I find myself with two places to post.

And so, fortified with a little gin, some lime, and a few other things mixed in, I’m trying to dig out of that hole.

Oh, and the lime was squeezed by one of these. I honestly can’t say enough good things about it. It’s totally simplified the most annoying part of drink making for me. God bless eBay.

And before I really dig in, there has been a lot of talk about books and length here and over at Iceland Spar. Here is a link to Marginal Revolution that relates nicely to what I’ve been saying. Remember, you will be tested.

There will now be a short break from what I had thought would be the next bit about the novella, as I address the five points Colin posted in the comment thread of the previous post. I responded briefly in the comments, but have decided to go into more detail.

“1. I read quickly.”

Well wow, all of us who read slowly, and take a while to work through a long novel are duly shamed by your ability to out pace us. I am trying to say that authors should be careful to only write long novels when there is no other way to write what they want to write about. But I’ve been put in my place, I just don’t read fast enough. It’s a character flaw.

“2. Modernism.”

What the fuck?! No, seriously. What the fuck kind of argument is that? Are you saying that modernism justifies length? Are you trying to say that modernist novels need to be long? Is the word meant to stand alone as some sort of modernist statement? I don’t know, because that isn’t an argument. It’s a word, totally removed from the context that would normaly grant it meaning.

“3. The Great Gatsby is overrated and trite.”

I don’t care how highly rated Gatsby is. That has no bearing on my argument that it does exactly what it means to do, and does so quickly. And further, just to take a moment to defend the novel, part the reason people think it is trite is due to the heavy use of its material by other storytellers.

“4. But there are some world-changing novellas out there.”

Fine.

“5. Supreme arrogance is not an undesirable trait in an artist. See Joyce, Warhol, Milton, Davis.”

I might not have been clear enough in saying that I don’t hold all long novels in contempt, I find many of them frustratingly over long. Underworld was used as an example. Editing could trim many long novels down. I implied that there was an arrogance to writing long novels, and arrogance is indeed often justified. Only two of those artists you mentioned were writers, so it’s harder to work them in. Though Miles Davis and Andy Warhol did produce works that were abnormally large for the format they worked in, neither Warhol’s art movies nor Davis’s later fusion era works (some droning in at over 45 minutes) claim as much of your time as an 800+ page novel will.

Joyce wrote several very long works. I’ll be honest. I haven’t read them yet, though I will probably be tackling Ulysses later this year. Does Joyce, or for that matter many of the Russian novelists, have material that justified the comparatively enormous size of their individual works? Maybe. The reader must decide on a case by case basis.

The argument that I’m working toward, and will be fleshing out in later posts, is that an author should be very careful to only write long novels when the ability to express their intent is compromised by shorter forms. I used Underworld as an example because I feel that it would have been better released as a series of short stories, possibly over the course of multiple collections. The effect of mashing all the stories in Underworld together, I feel, ultimately subverts what is good in the stories it contains.

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…

All right. I will be getting to novellas today, but first, a little something from Boing Boing yesterday.

Book promotion must be a tricky thing, as I’m always hearing that reading is on decline, and that the number of books published increases every year. So given that, book marketing must be blood sport. Right? Ok, maybe not. Anyhow, Mirranda July, who’s short story in the New Yorker did not fall into that “wow this is bland” category, has a new book out.

If it’s as good as the short story, it will be quite good indeed. But that’s not why I’m posting. Boing Boing pointed me to the promotional page, as designed by July. It’s fun. It also made me want to buy the book. Well done.

Sometimes, as I’m writing, I find myself wondering about the way the short story works within America’s reading society.

The market for short stories might be the most over saturated of all the markets for any form of entertainment. When it comes to breaking into the writing world, the short story is the method of choice for a great many of the writers, and would be writers, that I talk with. They flood any periodical that publishes short stories with submissions. To make matters worse, there are hundreds of venues for short stories, many with tiny readerships. A friend who goes to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop recently told me that everyone there is intent on getting published in the New Yorker. That’s all well and good, but we can’t all be published there, at least not our first story. Many of the short stories published are in periodicals with absolutely tiny readerships. Some of those readerships are probably composed entirely of writers and would be writers. Getting published in one of these doesn’t even necessarily get you published in a second one.

On top of this, the short story is an incredibly limiting form. The size of a short story theoretically goes up to 20,000 words, according to most sources I read. In practice they rarely do, with most of the short stories I see clocking in at between 5,000 and 9,000 words, give or take. This gives very little room for error and very little room to explore. It may be a limitation of the current writers I see getting published, but even in the top end periodicals I read, there is a great deal of very bland fiction. I’m talking about generic stories of young male discovery. I’m thinking of stories where an aged narrator learns something late in life that proves to be of great emotional value, or teaches a youngster the like. Hell, that second one is a plot that I’m shopping a copy of, and polishing another that arguably follows the same line.

It just doesn’t give you much to work with. You have to be in and out of the narrative so quickly that a lot of things don’t have time to develop. You have to realize what you are willing to leave out, and when you can do the leaving without frustrating the reader. It’s actually a great exercise for someone to learn about how narrative works. But I think maybe we’ve gotten too enamored with the exercise, and now we’re publishing it, instead of the adventurous stuff.

Sometimes it feels like we’re all building the same things with the short story, like its the ranch house of the fiction world.

It would be tempting to say that I’m not cut out for the short story, but I see so many other short stories that are falling prey to the same dangers. I read a fair number of short stories, and perilously few of them stick out for me. Is this a byproduct of the short fiction by committee attitude that I seem to hear about in writers groups? Too many times I seem to hear people subtly tailoring their own narrative desires to that of the small group that they work with all the time. The more I read short stories, the less I want to read them, the more they seem like a chore. These things should be palate cleansers. After a long novel, I should be able to pick up a collection of short stories and get a few sweet bursts of joyous concentrated narrative. What you think “joyous concentrated narrative” means should be open to interpretation.

It could mean a man meditating on the shape of his shoe as he puts it on in the morning, and then deciding to leave his wife. I could be four viewpoints on a dead man, from the minds of the people at his wake. It could be a madman in an asylum screaming about how we’re all doomed. I don’t really care as long as you grab my attention. It should not be another goddamn three part story of a teenager coming to terms with their own hesitant sexuality. Yes, I know, you went through that, we all did. Remember when reading was fun and mysterious? Maybe we should all be trying to get that feeling back into our fiction.

Next time: The novella, why I think we should all be reading and writing more of them.

I keep The Valve on my RSS feed, and sometimes I’m sorely tempted to just take it off the list. It’s not that it never has anything interesting to say, indeed it catches my attention at least once every day or two. But there are some decidedly frustrating aspects of it, like the titles of the damn posts, which I think I’ve griped about in the past.

This may be part of why I loved this post by one Scott Eric Kaufman. It’s pointed out in the comments that this has already been done to death, but it was a great post anyway. It seems n+1 ruffled some feathers by saying that blogs are a troublesome medium for criticism, which seems a bit obvious, given how quickly topics get old in blog land. Others did not seem to think it so.

Bonus: Contains the quoted phrase “I shit on Dante.”

All around just a fun summation of lit crits and would be lit crits being really catty with each other.

For a while now, there has been a little list on the side bar of the page. This list shows all the books I’m reading. I tend to be one of those people who has six started, and cycles through them until one grabs him, and then ads a new one when it’s done. This list had amazon.com links, and it was possible to earn a little kickback if people bought through the link. As originally set up, it went to the guy who wrote the little plugin. I changed that last night. I figured on the off chance that someone did buy something through the link, I might as well get a kickback, and ten months was enough of a thank you for the author of the plugin. Or something…

Anyhow, I set that up so that the money comes back to me. Because… why not? Books manage to be one of the biggest expenses in my life. I should go to the library and borrow them, but somehow I just feel compelled to own them. So now, strangely enough, I feel compelled to disclose that buying books through those links gets me money. You’ve been warned. If you feel like buying, please don’t let me stop you. But also don’t feel like you have to. There are over twenty books I’ve bought or been given that I have yet to read. I’m not likely to run out.

A few days ago I finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In the last few months I’ve read several Murakami, and they have all been good. Sometimes the end has frustrated me, but they have all been worth the price of admission.

What I’ve found is that Murakami starts to hijack your brain in strange ways. I might have to take a break from him, though there are still several books that appeal.

Wind-Up Bird is the story of a man named Toru. He starts out looking for a cat, and he ends up looking for his wife. Like most of Murakami’s male characters, he’s amazingly passive. At one point in the book a girl tells him that he is fighting as hard as he can for his wife, and yet he’s spending most of his time sitting around his house. Despite all the press Murakami gets for the psychic prostitutes, talking monkeys, and possessing sheep in his stories, it is the way his main characters act that is the most surreal. Yet the passive nature of many of his characters actually lends a touch of realism. Neal Stephenson has a line in Snow Crash, in which he says that all men like to dream that they could, with the right set of circumstances, become the most bad ass man imaginable. Murakami’s heroes have no such illusions, or if they do, their concept of bad ass is amazingly different from America’s.

I like that. Let’s face it. If a normal person were confronted with some of the situations that Murakami puts his protagonists into, the only thing they

could

do would be to sit around feeling a little confused. Murakami’s characters go with the flow like normal people, and it is often the best thing for them, even when you feel like screaming at them to take action.

It’s a dense novel, but one that can be enjoyably read without feeling compelled to unpack it. There were times that I found myself thinking about the references, resonances, and what might be symbolic of what, and enjoying it. It’s been a long time since I felt a book was that playful. It’s also sprouting books of criticism at fairly impressive rate, though it’s no where near as dissected as many Nabokov books are, while feeling like it might actually hold up to that level of inspection. At the very least it felt at several points like a novel that had to be reread if you wanted to really know it. That was also refreshing, though it might be a while before I actually reread it, as I have over 25 books that I actually own and have yet to read, with more calling out. There’s never enough time.

I also just finished The Kite Runner, but that’s going to be another post.

So, I got over halfway through City of a Thousand Suns, by Delany, before realizing that it was the third book in a trilogy. I had thought it made little sense at the beginning, and had just powered through, but then happened to check the inside cover. It was a brilliant feeling. I finished it anyway, and I’m not sure I’ll go back and read the first two. It’s from the very start of his career, and while it isn’t bad, it’s not amazing, much the way City of Illusions would not have started me on Le Guin had I never read any of her other work first. If I read the first two, I may comment more, but probably not.