Novellas for the Nineties
[In the following excerpt, Johnson examines the “novella” genre and gives a favorable review of War Babies.]
Beloved by writers, but often scorned by editors and readers, the novella has held a long but uncertain tenancy in the house of fiction. Traditionally considered too brief for individual publication in book form, but too lengthy for the format of most magazines and journals, the novella has broken into print most often as part of a short-story collection or alongside several other novellas in a classroom anthology. A few contemporary writers have managed to publish single novellas (presumably because an established reputation makes such publication commercially feasible), and literary magazines will sometimes make room for an outstanding example of the form. But while the short story has been enjoying a renaissance, and the lyric poem is a prestigious staple of literary journals and small presses, the novella remains a furtive, largely ignored presence in the publishing world, partly because the expansive, “blockbuster” novel and the minimalist short story are still the most visible categories in American fiction.
The novella is vulnerable not only to the demands of the marketplace; even academic critics, so voluble about the novel and the story, have either remained silent about this distinctive genre or have floundered considerably—and sometimes comically—in attempting to classify it. Should a novella be defined simply by its length? Are there unique aesthetic properties which set it apart from the short story and the novel? Is the novella to be distinguished from the “short novel” or the “novelette”? Such puzzlements over genre have scarcely been settled by that small band of intrepid scholars who have devoted book-length studies to the form. In Narrative Purpose in the Novella, Judith Leibowitz writes that “the short novel is a short version of the novel genre of fiction, whereas the novella is a different literary form, coinciding occasionally only in length with the short novel.” Mary Doyle Springer, in Forms of the Modern Novella, isn't much help, either, even when she declares with italic certainty that “the novella is a prose fiction of a certain length (usually 15,000 to 50,000 words), a length equipped to realize several distinct formal functions better than any other length.” Discussing the novellas of Henry James (who labeled them nouvelles), Krishna Baldev Vaid resorts to some mathematical gyrations in attempting to sort out the matter:
The length of a James nouvelle extends from about 17,000 to 26,000 words if we include Daisy Miller and The Lesson of the Master as nouvelles, each about 23,000 and 24,000, respectively. The Pupil and The Bench of Desolation run from 17,000-18,000 words. An International Episode runs to almost 30,000 words. Is it a “long” nouvelle? What of A London Life, The Aspern Papers, The Siege of London, and The Turn of the Screw, all in the early thirties or forty thousands? They exceed the length of a nouvelle and … do not yet qualify as short novels. They are just long tales. So An International Episode is one of the “shorter” long tales beyond the length of a nouvelle. Strict, consistent classification of James's shorter fiction is obviously difficult.
Obviously. But writers, as distinct from critics, are seldom interested in such classification, and the indeterminacy of the form is perhaps one of its chief attractions. Whatever the reason, a large number of important novelists have also made the novella an occasion of a major achievement. This distinguished group includes Melville, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka, Mann, Wharton, Faulkner, Porter, and preeminently James (who called the form his “ideal, the beautiful and blest nouvelle”). These writers intuitively grasped the only meaningful “definition” of the novella: its combination of the intensity and focus of the short story with the novel's amplitude of theme and characterization. Even though James himself had difficulty in placing his novellas with magazines, he referred often to the aesthetic advantages of the form, and such masterful novellas as The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers have become, for twentieth-century writers, classic models of fictional experimentation and technique.
The books reviewed here suggest that contemporary writers also consider the novella to be “beautiful and blest,” even though today's practitioners have met with the usual resistance. Saul Bellow, a Nobel laureate and our country's most honored living writer, was unable to place A Theft and The Bellarosa Connection with magazines, a circumstance which brought him to the innovative decision to publish them as paperback originals. Although Joyce Carol Oates's I Lock My Door upon Myself has arrived in hardcover, its favorable notice in The New York Times Book Review avoided any consideration of genre and referred to the book as a novel, inspiring a comment from Oates in the “Letters” section: “The work in question is not a novel, but a novella. At 98 printed pages, with a gravitational core akin to that of a short story, it has few of the formal properties of a novel. Indeed, told in novel form, the same narration would have required well beyond 300 pages.” Conversely, the other books reviewed here—Constance Urdang's American Earthquakes and Frederick Busch's War Babies—are billed by the publishers as novels, though both are considerably shorter than, for instance, James's The Turn of the Screw, and likewise have a short story's “gravitational core.” …
Frederick Busch's War Babies is considerably more successful in exploring its own ambitious themes: war and its aftermath, the nature of evil, the corrosive power of guilt. In the fall of 1984, a 35-year-old American lawyer, Peter Santore, travels to London in search of Hilary Pennels, whose father died in a Korean prisoner-of-war camp. Peter's own father served time in an American prison for treason, and was possibly responsible for the death of Lieutenant Pennels. Propelled by inherited guilt, Peter begins a love affair with Hilary, attempting both to understand and purge himself of the past. Tired of “living alone so profoundly,” he seeks “a sister-in-history.” Instead he finds a talkative, rather flighty bookstore owner who bears him no grudges and who makes grandiloquent pronouncements about sex, death, and fate.
The novella focuses upon Peter's relationship with Hilary and also with an older man named Fox, who had fought alongside Lt. Pennels in Korea. Fox's characterization is perhaps the novella's finest achievement: still obsessed with the war, he confirms Lt. Pennels' heroism and the treachery of Peter's father, stunning Peter with horrific details of torture and malnutrition in the camp. In a brilliant stroke worthy of another American allegorist, Herman Melville, Busch gives this oral historian fetid breath and a set of bad teeth, his “mouthful of brown and gold rot” becoming a vivid emblem of moral decay. He seems bent on punishing the son for the father's sins: “His rage at my father,” Peter reports, “no doubt at me, and … the pure power of the facts he pronounced, all drove his language on. … I felt no less bested than when I was a boy and a bully kneeled on my shoulders and spat down into my face.”
Like Urdang, Busch sometimes loads his story with more allegorical import than its plot can bear. Moreover, Hilary's characterization is never entirely convincing; her manic, outrageous behavior often seems gratuitous rather than meaningful. Both these problems are apparent in the scene describing the couple's portentous visit to Stonehenge, during which Hilary throws herself on one of the stones and pretends to be her favorite literary character, Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Even this scene, however, is marked by Busch's finely cadenced prose:
I followed Hilary's quick march counterclockwise and then stopped behind her. She was teetering on her toes—they were in American running shoes—and looking at a long, coffin-sized stone that was at right angles to us. It looked like blue-black rock and nothing more. The stones against the sky were spectacular—dark, immense, purposeful, and secret. The stone we stood at was like a bad imitation of a sarcophagus. … She sat on the stone as if it were a bed. I saw the guard in his dark blue uniform come walking from the far diameter of the circle. He rose between the stones. She lay down and she folded her hands at her waist and closed her eyes. I saw the lids flicker.
Busch develops his intriguing premise with skillful dialogue, masterful use of detail, and a brilliant plot twist in the concluding pages. Despite its lapses, War Babies is a vivid, memorable performance.
Are there any general inferences to be drawn from the fact that Busch and the other authors considered here, all of whom have done distinguished work in other genres, are devoting some of their best energies to the novella? Apart from the inherent advantages of the form, it might be particularly suited to a literary climate that has favored, throughout the 1980's, the powerful obliqueness and compression of Hemingway-inspired minimalist writers, most notably Raymond Carver. In the 1990's, the best American fiction will surely incorporate the stringent economy of minimalism even as it sheds the insipid themes and the predictable, present-tense monotone of Carver's epigonic followers. Thus it is possible that the novella, a form which can combine complex ideas with an adroitly controlled technique, may enjoy a new popularity, a fuller realization of what Henry James, in The Art of the Novel, praised as a genre whose “main merit and sign 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.”
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