I’ve been slow off the mark this year, mostly because instead of reading a sensible one or two novellas at a time, I’ve had 10 or 15 on the go. It might mean I’ll read more overall, but from day to day it feels like crawling through loads of books, never to finish any. Except I did finally finish these three, all of which were great reads. After my thoughts on each, I’ll ponder this week’s prompt, “What Is a Novella?”
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983)
This was a reread for me and our November book club book, as well as part of my casual project to read books from my birth year. I’ve generally been underwhelmed by Hill’s ghost stories, but I found this spookier than remembered and enjoyed spotting the nods to Victorian literature and to classic ghost story tropes. (Best of all, because it was so short, everyone actually read the book and came to the discussion. All 12 group members. I can’t recall the last time that happened!)
Hill keeps the setting deliberately vague, but it seems that it might be the Lincolnshire Fens in the 1930s or so. Arthur Kipps is a young lawyer tasked with attending the funeral of old Mrs Drablow and sorting through her papers. Locals don’t envy him the time spent in Eel Marsh House, and when he starts seeing a wasting-away, smallpox-pocked woman dressed in black in the churchyard, he understands why. This place harbours a malevolent ghost, and from the empty nursery with its creaking rocking chair to the marsh’s treacherous mud, Arthur fears that it’s out to get him.
The rational male narrator who insists he doesn’t believe in ghosts until he can’t deny an experience of one is a feature of the traditional ghost story à la M.R. James – and indeed, one of the chapter titles here (“Whistle and I’ll Come to You”) is a direct adaptation of a James story title. A framing story has Kipps as an older man writing the ghost story to share with his stepchildren. Some secondary characters have Dickensian names and there’s a Bleak House-esque description of a thick fog. The novel’s title must be an homage to Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White, with which it shares the theme of debated parentage.
A few members of our book club had seen the play or one of two film versions. Curiously, it seems like both movies alter the ending. Why, when the last four pages are such a perfect kicker? I might have dismissed the whole as a bit dull were it not for the brilliant conclusion. (Public library) [160 pages] 
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (2002)
This is Cathy’s example of a perfect novella. I picked it up on her recommendation and read it within a few days (though you could easily do so in one sitting). Robert Grainier is a manual labourer in the American West. His body shattered by logging before he turns 40 and his spirit nearly broken by the loss of his home to a forest fire, he looks for meaning in the tragedy and a purpose to the rest of his long life. Is he being punished for participating in the attempted lynching of a Chinese worker decried as a thief? Or for not helping an injured man he came across in the woods as a teenager?
Although Grainier might appear to be a Job-like figure, his loneliness never shades into despair, lightened by comic dialogues and the mildest of supernatural interventions. He starts a haulage business and keeps dogs. There are rumours of a wolf-girl in the area, and, convinced that his dog’s new pups are part-wolf, he teaches them to howl – his own favourite way of letting off steam.
A couple of gratuitously bleak scenes (a confession of incest and an accidental death) made me think Cormac McCarthy would be a major influence, but the tone is lighter than that. Richard Brautigan came to mind, and I imagine many contemporary writers have found inspiration here: Carys Davies, Ash Davidson, Donald Ray Pollock, even Patrick deWitt.
Gritty yet light, this presents life as an arbitrary accumulation of error and incident, longing (“Pulchritude!”) and effort. Grainier is an effective Everyman, such that his story feels not just all-American but universal. (Free from a neighbour) [116 pages] 
Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain (2023)
I had lost track of Tremain’s career a bit; I find her work hit and miss – perhaps too varied, though judging by her last five novels, she seems to have settled on historical fiction as her wheelhouse. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this latest book, but seeing that it was novella length, I was willing to give it a try. Tremain follows her heroine, Marianne Clifford, from the 1950s up to perhaps 1970. At age 15, she falls hopelessly in love with an 18-year-old aspiring writer, Simon Hurst, and loses her virginity in the back of his pale blue Morris Minor. She feels grown-up and sophisticated, and imagines their romance as a grand adventure that will whisk her away from her parents’ stultifying ordinariness –
when I thought about my future as Mrs Simon Hurst (riding a camel in Egypt, floating along in a gondola in Venice, driving through the Grand Canyon in an open-topped Cadillac, watching elephants drink from a waterhole in Africa) and about Mummy’s future (in the red-brick house in Berkshire with the shivery birch tree and the two white columns, playing Scrabble with Daddy and shopping at Bartlett’s of Newbury), I could see that my life was going to be more interesting than hers and that she might already be envious
– but his new post-school life in Paris doesn’t have room for her. As she moves to London and trains for secretarial work, Marianne is bolstered by friendships with plain-speaking Scot Petronella (“Pet”) and Hugo Forster-Pellisier, her surfing and ping-pong partner on their parents’ Cornwall getaways. Forasmuch as her life changes over the next 15 years or so – taking on a traditional wife and homemaker role; her parents quietly declining – her attachment to her first love never falters.
This has the chic and convincing 1960s setting of Tessa Hadley’s work. Marianne’s narration is a delight, droll but not as blasé as she tries to appear. Tremain could have easily fallen into the trap of making her purely naïve (in the moment) or nostalgic (looking back), but instead she’s rendered her voice knowing yet compassionate, and made her a real wit (“I thought, Everything in Paris looks as if it’s practising the waltz, whereas quite a lot of things in London … appear as if they’ve just come out of hospital after a leg operation”). Pet is very funny, too. And it’s always fun for me to have nearby locations: Newbury, Reading, Marlborough. In imagining a different life for herself, Marianne resists repeating her mother’s mistakes and coincides with the rising feminist movement. There are two characters named Marianne, and two named Simon; the revelations about these doubles are breathtaking.
This really put me through an emotional wringer. It’s no cheap tear-jerker but a tender depiction of love in all its forms. I think, with Academy Street by Mary Costello, it may be my near-perfect novella. (Public library) [181 pages] 
Novellas in November, Week 2: What Is a Novella?
- Ponder the definition, list favourites, or choose ones you think best capture the ‘spirit’ of a novella.
A novella is defined by its length in words, but because that’s often difficult for readers to gauge, for this challenge we go by the number of pages instead, making 200 an absolute maximum – though some books with wide margins and spacing may top that but still seem slight enough to count (while those with tiny type can feel much longer than 160–200 pages).
Thematically, a novella is said to be concentrated on one character or small set of characters, with one plotline rather than several. This week I’ve been musing on a theory: a novella is to a novel what a memoir is to an autobiography. That is, if the latter is a comprehensive and often chronological story, the former focuses on a particular time or experience and shapes a narrative around it. What it potentially sacrifices in scope it makes up for with intensity.
But as soon as I’d formulated this hypothesis to myself, I started thinking of exceptions on either side. Train Dreams, like Silk by Alessandro Baricco and A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler, conveys a pretty complete life story. And no doubt there are many full-length novels that are almost claustrophobic in their adherence to one point of view and timeline.
The simplest way I’d put it is that a novella is a book that doesn’t outstay its welcome. I think it must be easier to write a doorstopper than a novella. Once you’ve arrived at a voice and a style, just keeping going can become a question of habit. But to continue paring back to get at the essence of a character and a situation – that takes real discipline. My other criterion would be that it has to portray the full range of human emotion, even if within a limited set of circumstances. Based on that, Train Dreams and Absolutely and Forever both triumph.
A few classic novellas that do this particularly well (links to my reviews):
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
A few more contemporary novellas that do this particularly well (links to my reviews):
A Lie Someone Told You about Yourself by Peter Ho Davies
Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
Foster by Claire Keegan
A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
The Woman In Black is one of the very few ghost stories I like (and certainly if you only count ones that are longer than short-story-length). I’ve seen both films. I saw the original one at school and remember it being really tense until a silly puppet thing of the old woman suddenly crashed on screen and we all collapsed in hysterics!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Most people seemed to think the films were good. I’ve never seen Daniel Radcliffe in anything that isn’t Harry Potter!
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Daniel Radcliffe one is fine. Not amazing but perfectly watchable.
LikeLike
Hurrah! So happy to see a few of your novella reviews up. I have to say The Woman in Black really didn’t work for me as a book, but I know the film would terrify me. Odd, that. Haven’t ever read Denis Johnson but your assessment of Train Dreams makes me want to!
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s funny how some people think a book would be scarier and others think a film would be. Which one is it easier to look away from?
Definitely try the Denis Johnson!
LikeLike
I’m so glad you liked Train Dreams and I love your description of what a novella should do and should be.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks, Cathy, and thanks for the nudge to try it!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dear Rebecca
as I wrote before we know Susan Hill. She lives near our house. Indeed, her story is full of adaptations and her title is indeed based on W. Collin’s title.
Tremain’s novel we found boring and didn’t read to the end.
Thanks and cheers
The Fab Four of Cley
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s been interesting to see how polarized reviews of the Tremain are, mostly 2 stars or 5 stars on Goodreads.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This was very helpful Rebecca! I really appreciated that you shared your theory as you were thinking about this question. I’ve only read a couple of the examples you listed – Ethan Frome and Foster – and I loved them both. I didn’t even think to share some examples in my post. LOL But when I think about it, Claire Keegan definitely rises to the top of excellent novella writers, as does Stefan Zweig.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I really must read more by Zweig…
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve not read The Woman in Black but have seen both an excellent TV adaptation and a theatre production which quite literally made me jump out of my seat. Perhaps it’s time I got around to the book.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The play is said to be very good. Two in our book club had seen it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My husband and I saw a very unscary theatrical presentation of The Woman in Black, but I can’t remember if I ever read it. I haven’t since I started my blog, anyway. I also didn’t get along well with the only Denis Johnson book I read (Tree of Smoke) and haven’t really liked Rose Tremain, either. However, I’m just settling down to carefully look at the nonfiction books in your Nonfiction November section.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I also read his Jesus’ Son but didn’t enjoy it as much. Tremain is very hit and miss in my experience.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sorry, it was Novellas in November. I am only reviewing one this month, The Child and the River by Henri Bosco later in the month, but I’ll tag it when I do. I loved Foster and Our Souls at Night, although I didn’t really remember Our Souls as being a novella. But it’s been a long time. I’m reviewing Foster next month, unfortunately, so too late for Novellas in November.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Depending on the edition, Our Souls at Night is 179 pages or 192 pages; 200 pages is our limit for this challenge, and I seem to remember there not being that many words on a page.
How do you decide on your reviewing schedule? It’s impressive that you have it set so far in advance.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh, I see, then I imagine I have read a few more novellas than I think I have. I have Foster coming up soon.
It’s not that impressive. I read a lot, and I keep a notebook in which I write my reviews as I finish each book. I run several months ahead of my reviewing in my reading, and if I start to catch up with myself, I just review one less day a week. Every ten blogging days I look through my upcoming reviews and decide what order they should go in, or if I read a book that was sent to me by a publisher, I just insert it as soon as I can into my calendar. If I have a book that I know will be my Best of Ten, it waits its turn behind the other ones and I skip ahead to get the ones that won’t be best. I write up one review each blogging day and leave it in my drafts folder, and I am usually running 18-20 drafts ahead. So, that’s how I am scheduled so far ahead. It’s usually about a month ahead, at least.
LikeLike
But I also don’t tend to double up my reviews like you often do, so that puts me farther out in my schedule.
LikeLike
True, rather than posting daily I often review 2-5 books at once.
LikeLike
Wow, off to a great start! I am also lagging, both in this week’s theme and in actually finishing a novella. I’m struggling with the theme this week. Like you, I could argue either side, of whether a novella should focus on a singular incident in a life or whether it can encompass the whole thing. I think a talented writer can make a novella be whatever they want. And now I’m wondering whether writers actually set out to write a novella, or it just ends up that way?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think you’re right, a novella can do anything. It’s a good question, whether an author has a particular length in mind when they start out. I feel like plot bloating must be very common.
LikeLike
‘A novella is a book that doesn’t outstay its welcome.’ Love it!
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh I thought I’d written a comment here already! I love the not outstaying its welcome point as The Bloater, which I think I review tomorrow (I’ve been scheduling reviews thinking I’m being clever) was very witty and fizzy but would have started to grate had it been any longer!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good that with a title like ‘Bloater’ it avoided the bloat!
LikeLiked by 1 person
All of these are tempting, but especially Always and Forever. And then, looking at the other novellas you included after your three reviews, I feel like I have so much good reading ahead of me! One of these days/months/years I’m just going to read a whole pile of novellas. Waiting until November isn’t working for me very well. I’ve read two, though, and hoping to read one more.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I get overwhelmed by the piles of novellas I save up for each November, so I think I too need to read them throughout the year!
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain (Rebecca at Bookish Beck) […]
LikeLike
[…] my 2021 record of 29. The highlights included the Barton, Meier, Nouwen and Weingarten above plus Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, but the best of the lot was Absolutely and […]
LikeLike
[…] book club selections: By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah and The Woman in Black by Susan […]
LikeLike
[…] Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain: At age 15, Marianne falls in love. She imagines her romance with Simon as a grand adventure (and escape from her parents’ ordinariness), but his post-school life in Paris doesn’t have room for her. Much changes over the next 15 years, but never her attachment to her first love. This has the chic, convincing 1960s setting of Tessa Hadley’s work, and Marianne’s droll narration is a delight. It put me through an emotional wringer – no cheap tear-jerker but a tender depiction of love in all its forms. […]
LikeLike
[…] almost tempted to mark this as an R.I.P. read, because it’s very dark indeed. Like The Woman in Black, it takes place in an ominous English mansion and its environs. Other scenes take place in a creepy […]
LikeLike
[…] with her task, Ellen begins to doubt she’ll come away with usable material. I was reminded of The Woman in Black, The Thirteenth Tale, and especially Wakenhyrst what with the local eel legends. The subplot about […]
LikeLike