Less is More… More or Less: Curl up with a Good Novella
Ever have this happen to you? You start reading a large novel, say 600 or 700 pages, and it’s one of the best things you’ve ever read and when you set it down to finally get some sleep you say to yourself, “I can’t wait to read more!”. Then life happens… you need to get your taxes done… you are working like a dog at your day job… your only free day on the weekend is spent making 9 hours of small talk at a stuffy house party. You and your better half clean your abode and the book gets moved from your bedside nightstand to the cluttered book shelf in a spare bedroom. You forget about the poor, lonely book. One day when you and your better half are re-cleaning your abode, you find the book and remember what a beautiful and profound experience it was reading those first 137 pages. You pick up the book that evening, take out your bookmark and realize… you can’t remember what the heck you read and you’ll have to start over!
Why go through this experience over and over again? Life’s too short and time’s too tight to wade through these magnum opuses. What’s the solution? Easy – the novella.
What exactly is a novella? It’s a narrative work of fiction shorter than a novel yet longer than a short story. Don’t think you’ve read a novella? What about Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Animal Farm by George Orwell, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, or Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote?
Some of the greatest works of fiction have been novellas. My personal favourites are Of Mice and Men and The Old Man and the Sea. I raced through each book in the course of a day and almost ate them when I was done! “Leave them wanting more” is a cliché more lazy novelists should take to heart. Too often books are unfairly judged not by their cover but by their spine. That gigantic book must be the masterwork of an obsessive genius rather than a self-indulgent tome in desperate need of some editing. Meanwhile, “novella” is a dirty word in many literary circles. When Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 it was described as a short novel rather than a novella even though it is only 150 pages. Stephen King described the novella as 'an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic'. He wrote several including Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (but then again he also wrote all 1138 pages of It).
Limitations lead to creativity and that’s the beauty of the novella. There are so many possibilities to play with language and character without getting lost in the weeds of subplots. And, their irresolute endings can stick in your head much longer than your average Great American Novel.
