Charles D’Ambrosio

Aspects of the Novella

There’s a good deal of boringness in our literature, and much of it is stored away in big novels. I don’t mean to knock the novel, big or small, but a degree of dullness seems to define the form, belonging to it natively, part of its apparatus, no different than characters or dialogue or point-of-view. The tedious passages, those longueurs, encourage certain readers (me) to cheat a bit and skim, here and there, but that doesn’t seem to do the novel any real harm.

Is skimming a skill unique to the novel? 

One can’t imagine monotony calling the shots elsewhere. You don’t skim a short story or flip impatiently through a poem or speed-read a play, looking for the good parts. But this is a class on the novella, and I’m only trying to advance a rudimentary definition of the form. To hear people talk, the novella is either a novel that’s not long enough, or it’s a story that’s not short enough, but at any rate, a prose-thing marked by its inadequacies. It has a neither/ nor quality, but is that enough for us, this negative not-not construction? Can it be affirmatively stated? Allowed an identity? So here: A novella is a novel minus the boring parts. Henry James referred to these prose-things as ‘nouvelles.’ He wrote quite a few of them and liked their shapeliness, their “scope and neatness,” describing the ‘nouvelle’ as “a complicated thing with a strong brevity.” We’re going to do our own describing, not to define the form but to discover it. We’ll identify its traits and tendencies, its unique powers. This is ultimately a writing class, so we’ll be using the novella as lens to look at time, point of view, characterization,
shape and structure –in this particular environment, under these specific conditions. 

We want the ‘whatness’ of a novella: What makes it what it is? Chances are you’ve read your fair share of novellas—or prose-things that live in that neighborhood. Check your shelves. James Joyce, Gayl Jones, Willa Cather, Claire Keegan, Denis Johnson, Lorrie Moore, Annie Ernaux, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Leo Tolstoy, James Welch, Thomas Mann, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Ernest J. Gaines, Julie Otsuka, Edith Wharton, Jim Harrison, Vivek Shanbhag, Jane Smiley, Nikolai Gogol, Patrick Modiano, Andre Dubus—and on and on and on... 

We’ll read one "nouvelle" together, just so we have something in common to organize our discussion. I look forward to the discoveries we’ll make together.