Novella, Short Novel, Long Story: Four Contemporary Examples

You can bet that whenever a critic reviews a new collection of short stories that includes a long story, or what the reviewer sometimes terms a “novella,” he or she will usually argue that the long story is the best, most complex, story in the collection. This is often a result of the unexamined assumption that a novel, by its very length, is more complex than a short story and that since the word “novella” has the word “novel” embedded in it, it must be that a novella, by its very length, and thus its similarity to a novel, must also be more complex than a short story.

However, the word “novella” did not originate as a generic term for a long fiction, but rather for a short one. The word "novella" comes from the Latin word novellus, a diminutive of the word novus, which means "new." It first became associated with the telling of stories in the thirteenth century with collections of "new" versions of old saint's tales, exempla, chivalric tales, and ribald stories. Eventually, the term became associated with tales that were fresh, strange, unusual--stories, in short, that were worth the telling. The most decisive historical event to establish the term "novella" as a designation for a "new" kind of fiction was Boccaccio's decision to give the name "novella" to the tales included in the Decameron in the fourteenth century.

What made Boccaccio's stories "new" was the fact that they marked a shift from the sacred world of Dante's "divine" comedy to the profane world of Boccaccio's "human" comedy. However, the resulting realism of the Decameron should not be confused with the realism developed by the eighteen-century novel. The focus in Boccaccio's tales is not on a character presented in a similitude of everyday life, but on the traditional world of story, in which characters serve primarily as "functions" of the tale.

With Cervantes, in the sixteenth century, as with Boccaccio before him, something "new" also characterizes the novella. First, Cervantes in his Exemplary Novels (which are of the length we usually associate nowadays with the “novella,” i.e. a long story) does not present himself as a collector of traditional tales but as an inventor of original stories. As a result, he becomes an observer and recorder of concrete details in the external world and a student of the psychology of individual characters. Although plot is still important, character becomes more developed than it was in the Decameron, and thus psychological motivation rather than story motivation is emphasized. Characters do not exist solely for the roles they play in the stories, but also for their own sake as if they were real.

In Germany, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the novella began to detach itself from the notion of the form inspired by Boccaccio and Cervantes and to be supported by a theory of its own and also to be associated with a long story and termed novelle. It is this form that Henry James refers to in his preface to Lesson of the Master, calling the “beautiful and blest nouvelle” his “ideal,” adding that the “main merit” of which is “the effort to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity—to arrive, on behalf of the multiplicity, at a certain science of control.” James’s conviction is that the novella may be more complex than the short story, but that it has the brevity and control of the short story—that it is not “complicated” in the same way the novel is.

One of the best suggestions I have read about the difference between the “complications” of the novel and the “complications” of the novella was made by John Gardner and Lennis Dunlap in the textbook collection of short stories they edited in 1962, The Form of Fiction. They refer to the long story as a short novel.

“Because the short novel writer tends to follow a single character, the rhythm of the short novel is usually like that of the story, not like that of many novels, in which points of tension arise first in an episode concerned with one character, then in an episode concerned with another. Also, action in the short novel—almost necessarily—tends toward symbolic meaning. Whereas the short story writer characteristically explores meaning in some basic situation, the short novel writer concerns himself with a protracted action; and since the short novelist usually cannot enrich the protracted action he is presenting by juxtaposing it against another protracted action within the work, as would the novelist, he tends to enrich and the same time unify the total action by exploring it in symbolic terms. That is, in addition to imagistic symbolism, the short novel writer is likely to use symbolic juxtapositions of action, either within the total action or between actions in the work and actions lying outside it.

“Since the use of action as symbol is often apparent only in retrospect, that is, only after the pattern is established, symbolism borne by action, unlike imagistic symbolism, is not likely to leap out at the reader each time it appears.

“The point here is not that the short novel must be symbolic on the level of action or that the short story and novel may never use symbolism in this way. But such symbolism is far more common in good short novels than in good short stories and novels and may therefore be considered a common, though not an essential, feature of the form.”

Irving Howe, in his introduction to Classics of Modern Fiction: Eight Short Novels, (1968), has also suggested this notion of symbolic action in the short novel or novella:

“Whereas the short-story writer tries to strike off a flash of insight and the novelist tries to create an illusion of a self-sufficient world, the author of the short novel is frequently concerned with showing an arc of human conduct that has a certain symbolic significance. The short novel is a form that encourages the writer to struggle with profound philosophic or moral problems through a compact yet extended narrative. In fact, it seems to be the one literary genre in modern times capable of performing the functions that in earlier ages was the privilege of allegory. The material in a short novel is full enough to allow its symbolic significance to emerge with greater complexity than could be expected from a short story; it is brief enough to ensure the work’s being self-contained, compressed, and disciplined.”

Judith Leibowitz, in her book Narrative Purpose in the Novella (1974) says that the generically distinct nature of the novella is its double effect of “intensity and expansion.” She notes that all the thematic motifs in the novella are interrelated, which creates an intensity of focus: “This outward expansion from a limited focus is the effect of the typical plot construction of the novella. The action in a novella does not give the effect of continuous progression, of a large area being covered as in the novel, but of a limited area being explored intensively. The action is generally compressed by means of a repetitive structure.”

Anyone familiar with the classics of the novella form in the nineteenth and twentieth century will sense the rightness of these suggestions about symbolic action, intensity of focus, and compression. Consider the following, for example:

Kafka, Metamorphosis

Conrad, Heart of Darkness

James, Beast in the Jungle

Lawrence, The Fox

Mann, Death in Venice

McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Café

Porter, Noon Wine

Melville, Billy Budd

Roth, Goodbye, Columbus

Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood

Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Joyce, The Dead

Steinbeck, The Pearl

Salinger, Franny

Andrea Barrett, Ship Fever

Lan Samantha Chang, Hunger

Alice Munro, Love of a Good Woman

Andre Dubus, Dancing After Hours

I have already commented in early blog posts on Yiyun Li’s “Kindness,” Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending—contemporary novellas/short novels/long stories (what you will) that have bee critically well received. All three have some of the aspects we often associate with novels; for example, all three deal with the whole life of a central character—well, not the whole life, but rather significant chunks of the whole life of the character, and all three seem firmly contextualized within an historical epoch or era. They also exhibit some of the aspects we associate with the short story; for example, all three, in addition to being organized historically, are also organized thematically, with episodes selected to symbolically echo the central theme; and all three are relatively tightly organized, with few of the extraneous asides and subplots that we often associate with novels.

Much the same can be said of Anthony Doerr’s novella-length title story from his prize-winning collection, Memory Wall. Doerr’s story covers the whole life of its central character, seventy-four-year-old Alma Konachek, by using a futuristic concept of storing her memories (rapidly fading from her mind by dementia) on recorded cartridges. Thus, the concept of a whole life, which is embodied somewhat chronologically in the other three novellas under consideration here, is concretely embodied.

At one point, Alma’s doctor tells her: “Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.” Doerr echoes this notion of memory with Alma’s husband Harold’s obsession with a rare fossil, and with the general notion of time being compressed/preserved in a spatial way. When one character stares at a photo of Harold, he thinks he is “doomed to repeat the same project over and over, hunting among a thousand things for a pattern, searching a convoluted landscape for the remains of one thing that has come before.”

The question of whether these four works are long stories, short novels, or novellas is first of all a marketing issue. If the work is marketed in a single volume, as it is for The Sense of an Ending and Train Dreams, the publisher, appealing to the public preference will label it on the cover as a novel. If it is in a collection or short stories, it may be labeled as a novella, e.g. subtitled something like “Selected Stories and a Novella.” The phrase “short novel” has no real marketing value.

In my opinion, there is a critical difference between a novel that is short and a story that is long. Both in its tradition and in its way of meaning, the novella is closer to the short story than to the novel. Indeed, any time the novella begins to veer away from short story technique and closer to novel technique, it is perhaps better to use the term “short novel” to refer to it. In other words, in my opinion, a short novel is just a novella badly done, or a novel that just happens to be short.

Which of the four cited works would I call short novels and which would I call novellas? I think Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is a short novel, for Barnes too often indulges in the novelistic temptation to ruminate, pontificate, and wander about in seemingly interesting, but not really thematically essential sidebars. I also think Yiyun Li’s “Kindness” is more like a short novel than a long story, for it mostly just charts the lonely life of a single character within the context of her social life in the Chinese army.

However, I see Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” as being more like a novella or long story in its use of myth, legend, symbolism, and in its thematic organization around repeated motifs. I also see Anthony Doerr’s “Memory Wall” as more like a novella or long story in its single-minded focus on the theme of memory, although I find it much more self-consciously constructed and less magical than “Train Dreams.”

Why are these generic terms important? Well, as I have suggested before, you cannot really read a work in any meaningful way unless you have some orientation as to “how” it means and thus what to expect from it. Of course, generic expectations can be exploded by a good writer, who always manages to create a new thing out of an old thing. But, the reader still has to have some familiar starting point in order to understand the new thing. Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner talk about this dual process of assimilation and accommodation in a child’s development. And E. H. Gombrich discuses it in relationship to art in Art and Illusion, 1960.

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending

I just read that Adam Mars-Jones won the first annual Hatchet Job of the Year Award for his snidely clever review of Michael Cunningham’s novel By Nightfall, beating out, among other worthy (or unworthy, as the case may be) contenders, Geoff Dyer’s diminution of Julian Barnes’ already diminutive novel, The Sense of an Ending, in a review entitled “Julian Barnes and the Diminishing of the English Novel.” The prize was a year’s supply of potted shrimp.

I must admit up front that I have never been a fan of Julian Barnes. I did enjoy his earlier short novel Flaubert’s Parrot, (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984), perhaps partly due to my much greater admiration for Flaubert’s story Un coeur simple, in which said parrot lived, died, and was stuffed. I taught Flaubert’s Parrot in a graduate-level course in 20^th century British Lit a few years ago. But I did not care much for Barnes’ two collections of short stories, Cross Channel (1996) and The Lemon Table (2004).

Cross Channel is thematically of a piece, all the stories focusing on the British in France, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. The stories also share the common characteristic of being grounded as much on historical fact and cultural values as they do on individual characters. As a result they sometimes lean as much toward the essayistic as they do toward story. Although this creates a strong factual context for the stories, giving them a sense of historical reality, it tends to make them focus more on social abstractions than on individuals.

The Lemon Table is obsessed with loss: loss of sexual vitality, loss of creativity, loss of mental acuity, loss of romance. With the exception of one story, “Knowing French,” told in the form of letters to a writer named Julian Barnes from a lonely 81-year-old woman living in an old folks home--a woman who is still alert, intelligent, witty, and full of life--there is very little dignity, reconciliation, comfort, companionship, or other compensations of aging in these stories.

When The Sense of an Ending came out last year, I was not quick to buy it, although I was somewhat intrigued that Barnes had used the same title as that of a book I do much admire, Frank Kermode’s 1967 “Studies in the Theory of Fiction,” being the Mary Flexner Lectures Kermode gave at Bryn Mawr College in Fall 1965. (Brief sidebar here: I had the privilege of attending a Kermode lecture at Trinity College in Dublin fifteen years ago and had to restrain myself from standing and applauding when he blasted the new historicists and cultural critics for their desertion of literature for historical context and polemical politics.) I did not rush out and buy The Sense of an Ending when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year either, especially after the brouhaha resulting from announcements that the shortlist was “readable” and the resulting accusations that the Booker was “dumbing down.”

After being shortlisted three times—always a bridesmaid, never a bride—Julian Barnes walked down the aisle and accepted the Man Booker Prize--50,000 pounds ($79,117.24 in American dollars) for The Sense of an Ending with a snort that he was “as much relieved as delighted,” presumably because, he thought, it was about damned time. In spite of this big win, I still did not feel tempted to add to Barnes’ new wealth by shelling out $23.95 for 163 small pages with big margins and lots of white space. (You may recall, I felt similarly constrained to pinch pennies earlier this year when Farrar, Straus & Giroux released Denis Johnson’s short novel Train Dreams in a slim 116 page volume, contenting myself to go back to my 2003 edition of The O. Henry Prize Stories where it was reprinted from The Paris Review.) I posted my response to Train Dreams in an earlier blog entry.

Then damn all! My wife received a tidy little hardback copy of The Sense of an Ending as a Christmas present from an old friend. So, what could I do? There it was. I had to see what the fuss was about. I sat down, and in a couple of hours, I read it. I was glad I didn’t pay for it. I didn’t like it. I thought it was clichéd, clumsy, tedious, pretentious, and just plain ordinary. How in God’s name could this book win the Man Booker Prize? I went back and read the reviews, and that’s when I discovered Geoff Dyer’s so-called “hatchet job” in the December 16 issue of The New York Times. Dyer says he did not “get the book” when he first read it and still didn’t get it when he dutifully reread it after Barnes won the Man Booker and the chair of the judging panel said that there was more to it each time you read it. Dyer sniffed, “To me, there seemed less to get second time around. If such a thing is possible, I didn’t get it even more than I hadn’t got it first time around.”

Arguing that the ideas about memory and history sprinkled throughout what he calls a “very short novel" are “commonplace,” Dyer argues that The Sense of an Ending is not terrible, just rather “average,” concluding: “It is averagely compelling (I finished it), involves an average amount of concentration and, if such a thing makes sense, is averagely well-written: excellent in its averageness.”

In face of this scathing phrase, I had no choice but to read The Sense of an Ending a second time also. Hell, I even went back and read Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending again, thinking maybe I missed some subtle connection that Barnes had in mind. I don’t think so. Kermode’s “sense of an ending” has to do with how endings make possible the transformation of “one damn thing after another” into meaningful fictional patterns. Barnes seems to be interested, as he was in the stories in The Lemon Table, with getting older and trying to make sense of what went before. Not that this is a trivial human mystery and motivation—just that Barnes does not have the ability to go beyond what Dyer rightly calls “commonplace” ruminations about this issue by his not very perceptive protagonist in The Sense of an Ending.

It’s just my opinion, of course, but I suspect that Barnes won the Man Booker for this “average” short novel because, well, it was about time, since Barnes had already been passed over three times, once for the much better book Flaubert’s Parrot. I think Barnes probably knew this also, for when he was asked if he thought The Sense of an Ending was his best book, he hedged by repeating the old authorial saw that he thought his “best” novel was the one he was about to write or has just finished writing, adding, however, “I’m very attached to Flaubert’s Parrot.

Soon after The Sense of an Ending received the Man Booker Prize, The Guardian Books Blog posed the following question: “When is a novel a novella?” Of the several responses to the question, the most thoughtful was by Chris Power, who says he has never liked the word “novella,” because he thought it an “unnecessary distinction that underlines and in some way ratifies this anxiety about size.” He then asks if Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is a long story or a short novel.” Is the 80-page “Kindness” from Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl a very short novel or a very long story? Power asks, responding, “I think it is the latter. The same goes for the title story of Anthony Doerr’s Memory Wall. They are lengthy (for short stories), but they have the focused intensity of short fiction. Would they profit in any way from being called novellas? I don’t think so.”

Eileen Battersby called Yiyun Li’s “Kindness” a “near novella.” Jane Ciabattari called it a “novella.” Most reviewers call it a “long story.” If it had appeared in a single volume, they would probably have called it a “short novel.” In an interview, Joe Fassler asked Li whether she would call “Kindness” a novella or a short story and whether that distinction mattered to her. Li replied that it did not matter, but that when she started writing that piece she knew it would be a longer story. She says she had read William Trevor’s novella The Night at Alexandra, which was in the first person voice of an older man looking back on his youth, and wanted to write something similar in first person, using a woman narrator. Li adds, “When I was in her voice, I noticed that she would gloss over years without saying anything and hen she would go into details, and I think that’s how memory works for her.”

James Wood called Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams a novella. The central character Robert Granier is a loner, like the 41-year-old woman Moyan in Yiyun’s Li’s novella. In his review of Train Dreams, Anthony Doerr calls the story a novella, terming it a “small masterpiece.” Doerr argues that it is the “totality” of the work, as Poe used that term to describe the short story as a form, that makes “Train Dreams” so good. You can read it in one sitting in less than two hours.

The title story of Anthony Doerr’s own collection, Memory Wall, which won the 2010 Story Prize ($2,000.00), (beating out, by the way, Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl), has been called both a “novella” and a “long story.”

Having read all four of these works—“Memory Wall,” Train Dreams, “Kindness,” and The Sense of an Ending, I ask myself if they have anything in common other than the fact that they seem somewhat longer than what we expect of a short story and somewhat shorter than what we expect of a novel. I have followed the convention already adopted by earlier commentators of placing “Memory Wall” and “Kindness” in double quotation marks and italicizing Train Dreams and The Sense of an Ending—a convention which might suggest that the first two are long stories, while the second two are short novels. But, actually, the convention only reflects that the first two have never appeared in a single volume, while the second two have been released as single volumes (as a side note, Train Dreams was put inside double quotation marks when referred to in The Paris Review and The O. Henry Prize Stories, but now is italicized because it has appeared in a single, albeit slim, volume.)

So, is there a significant difference between a short story, a short novel/novella, and a novel, other than the promotional value given to a work when a publisher smells the money and releases the work as a single volume? (Brief side note: Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” was released as a single volume when the movie gave it cache, although no one ever called it a novel, even a short novel.) Page numbers are no help, for all a publisher has to do to bulk up a long story into single volume status is to use wide margins, large type, and lots of white space on the page. Word count does not really tell us much either. The criterion for the Man Booker Prize is “full length novel,” but no word count is specified. On the other hand, the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award (at 30, 000 pounds; or $47,469 American dollars, the world’s biggest prize for a single story) specifies the work must be 6,000 words or less. Jane Smiley, in her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, says a novel is usually between 100,000 and 175,000 words.

The page number/word length criterion is a mug’s game, it seems to me—of little value. I think we can all agree there are significant differences between Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick, his novella Billy Budd, and his short story “Bartleby the Scrivener.” I think we can all agree there are differences between Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors, his novella The Turn of the Screw, and his short story “The Real Thing.” I think we can agree that there are differences between Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim, his novella Heart of Darkness, and his short story “The Lagoon.” Yes, we probably all can agree that there are differences other than word count, but what are the differences between the three categories that are important for the reading of the works? Should I have different expectations when I begin reading these three different types of fictional works? What are those expectations?

I will try to suggest some answers to these questions, as well as discuss the similarities and differences between The Sense of an Ending, Train Dreams, “Memory Wall,” and “Kindness” in my next blog entry.