Five Novellas To Read This Spring
A novella is the literary equivalent of a cupcake. Small, adaptable, and sold at specialty stores with soft lighting and vaguely European salespeople. Just as cupcakes constitute their own dessert genus (a world apart from “small cake”), novellas are more than short novels. Their size transforms every part of their identity. Clocking in at just over 100 pages, novellas are candid and humble where novels sometimes feel like the work of a sweaty, heavy-breathing MFA candidate. With characters that live in a borderland between depth and caricature, novellas are experimental and open-ended. Refreshing, is what they are. You can also buy them on Amazon, not just in softly lit parchment temples.
Read them if you:
- Only read books on your commute and can’t remember minor characters’ names or thematic complexities from one ride to the next.
- Enjoy the rush of dopamine that comes from finishing something. From holding a pile of paper in your hand as you ponder the fact that the words in that pile of paper are now stored in your brain.
- Appreciate small things.
- Want to put skinny books in your back pocket.
- Or your jacket pocket.
- Or your heart pocket, if that were a thing surgeons did.
Here are five short, honest, inviting novellas. Each can be read in an afternoon, maybe two.
1. 03 by Jean-Christophe Valtat
“Hadn’t I already begun to suspect that with feelings, as with revolutions, the more spontaneous-seeming were actually the outcome of long and involved tactical maneuvers?”
A teenage boy in France sees a girl waiting for a bus and thinks, for 84 pages, about approaching her. This novella was originally published in French. Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, stumbled on it in a French bookstore, loved it, and promptly used his publishing magick to sell an English translation. It is a headlong plunge into the innermost sanctum of an inner monologue. The teenage narrator is suspicious of adults and easily frustrated — he thinks and rethinks and superthinks the meaning of adolescence and adulthood. Jean-Christophe Valtat himself calls 03 “less a story, maybe, than about getting frustrated by the impossibility of any story to happen.” Read this if you’ve ever questioned “growing up” as a concept.
2. Walks with Men by Ann Beattie
“People say women are catty, but men are doggy: they just walk around silently with their bone, until they want to bury it.”
Ever wanted to read the print version of that Girls episode where Hannah fucks a personified brownstone? Maybe not. This is better than that would be anyway. Jane (an aspiring writer, in New York, in the eighties…of course of course of course) meets a man who ~teaches~ her The Ways of The World. What he really teaches her is this: How to be less gullible when you’re twenty-two and a hot guy asks you to move in with him, then asks you to marry him in the blink of a blue Patrick Wilson-esque eye. If this book were a color, it would be watery grey, like one of those rainy April afternoons.
3. Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino
“It was the sensation of her teeth in my flesh that I was imagining, and I could feel her tongue lift me against the roof of her mouth, enfold me in saliva, then thrust me under the tips of the canines.”
Italo Calvino wanted to write five novellas, one dedicated to each of the five senses. He wrote three before he died. They’re published here, together:
- Taste: A couple goes to Oaxaca and — instead of sex with each other — they have taste bud sex with chilies and mole.
- Sound: A paranoid king desperately needs a Xanax when he hallucinates that all his courtiers are whispering about him.
- Smell: Men hunt for women with their noses. (This one is really three stories, with three narrators: two modern men and one prehistoric Neanderthal, all of them very scent-centric.)
Read these, and then go write sight and touch.
4. Shopgirl by Steve Martin
“He doesn’t understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart”
Yes, I know it was a mildly successful film with Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman in the vein of Garden State and other mid-aughts romcoms, but it’s also a nearly perfect novella. The first novella on the syllabus for ENG 100: Books That Are Almost Perfect. Mirabelle sells silk gloves at a Nieman Marcus in Los Angeles. What she actually does is stand behind the counter slowly dying as rich people walk by, not noticing her or the gloves. She wants to be an artist, and she wants to fall in love. Both of those things happen, but it’s stressful. It’s always stressful when things we want to happen happen.
5. Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole
“The completeness of a child is the most fragile and most powerful thing in the world. A child’s confidence is the world’s wonder.”
A novella, travelogue, and memoir folded into less than two hundred pages. This book is basically a plane ticket to Lagos. It’s fiction, but written with so much detail it feels like journalism. A narrator visits his family in Nigeria and feels the city’s corruption like a dull headache: policemen who accept bribes, spammers in Internet cafés (“Dear Sir/Madam, Your assistance is needed…”), and immigration officers who ask for tips. Teju Cole has no pretense; he does not need to tie loose ends together or file his thoughts under themes. He takes things as they come, trying to do what we all do when we go home: trace our steps, wondering how we got from where we came from to where we are.
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