Novella Month - Definition - John Fulton

What a refreshing question—one that nobody asks these days.  In the late 19^th-Century, the novella was a popular form.  Magazines printed them and paid well for them and readers devoured them so ravenously that when Henry James published “Daisy Miller” in a popular magazine, he became instantly infamous for his depiction of an American girl of loose morals.  The form was so good to James that he called it the “blessed novella.”  Alas, today it is an orphaned form, rarely able to find a home in either books (publishers have no faith in marketing novellas) or in literary magazines, which have little space to dedicate to a form that requires so many pages.

 

My favorite thing about reading and writing novellas (and I have written four of them, to my agent’s chagrin) is the way the form can have the propulsive focus of the short story without compromising the expansiveness of character and event of the novel.  While a short story may show you one or two things about a character, it does so mostly by suggestion and implication.  Novels, on the other hand, can give us the sense of intimately knowing a character as well as we think we know ourselves.  At the same time, a novel, especially a larger one, can fatigue the reader with a pleasant sort of boredom that comes from knowing someone or something too deeply or for too long.  After page 200 or 250 or 450, the novel can lose some of its power to surprise us, to show us something entirely new.  As a hybrid form that is at once a compressed novel and an expansive short story, the novella joins the strengths of both forms.  In 50-120 pages or so, a skilled writer can sustain tension and suspense while at the same time drawing a full portrait of several characters.

 

I’d like to point interested readers to some of the best novellas of recent decades so that they can see for themselves just how powerful the form can be.  I wonder how many people know of or have read the classic novella “Light in the Piazza” by Elizabeth Spencer.  It’s absolutely beautiful, stunningly so, and possesses the compression of the story and the expansiveness of the novel that I talk about above.  It’s a must read.  “The Age of Grief” by Jane Smiley is, I think, her best work and comes in at just over a hundred pages.  William Trevor’s “Nights at the Alexandra” leaves one floored with its tone of aching sadness and nostalgia.  More recently Jim Harrison’s “A Beast God Forgot to Invent” blew me away.  No doubt many have already read Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, which, with the help of huge font, was sold as a novel.  But, in fact, it’s a novella.

 

One last thought: Why don’t novellas sell in our country as stand-alone books?  I’m in France as I write this and can walk into a bookstore and purchase any number of beautiful little paperbacks that the French refer to as “nouvelle” (strictly translated, this means short story).  They run from 80-150 pages, are cheaper than full-length novels, and clearly have an audience here.  In fact, one best-selling fiction writer, Amélie Nothomb (she’s Belgian but writes in French), publishes almost exclusively in this form.  Clearly, the French publishing industry takes the form seriously and French readers do, too.  So perhaps the novella only goes begging on our shores for lack of a commitment from big houses with PR money.  Who knows?

 

Bio

 

John Fulton earned his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan and is the author of three books of fiction, Retribution (Picador USA), which won the Southern Review Short Fiction Award in 2001, the novel More Than Enough (Picador USA), which was a Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers selection.  His most recent book, The Animal Girl, a collection of two novellas and three stories, was short listed for the Story Prize and was a finalist for the Patterson Fiction Prize.  His short fiction has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, cited for distinction in the Best American Short Stories, short-listed for the O. Henry Award, and published in numerous journals, including Zoetrope, Oxford American, and The Southern Review.  He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.