The Woman in Black, Train Dreams, and Absolutely & Forever (#NovNov23)
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
Six Degrees of Separation: Romantic Comedy to Wild Fell
This is a fun meme I take part in every few months.
For August we begin with Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, one of my top 2023 releases so far. (See Kate’s opening post.)
#1 Sittenfeld’s protagonist, Sally Milz, writes TV comedy, as does Kristin Newman (That ’70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, etc.), author of What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding, a lighthearted record of her travels and romantic conquests. (She even has a passage that reminds me of Sally’s Danny Horst Rule: “I looked like a thirty-year-old writer. Not like a twenty-year-old model or actress or epically legged songstress, which is a category into which an alarmingly high percentage of Angelenas fall. And, because the city is so lousy with these leggy aliens, regular- to below-average-looking guys with reasonable employment levels can actually get one, another maddening aspect of being a woman in this city.”)
#2 I didn’t realize when I picked it up in a charity shop that my copy smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. I aired it in kitty litter, then by scented candles, and it still reeks. I reckon I can tolerate the smell long enough to finish it and put it in the Little Free Library, which gets good ventilation. A novel I acquired from the free bookshop we used to have in the mall in town was the only book I can remember having to get rid of before reading because it just smelled too bad (also of cigarettes in that case): My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult.
#3 So I didn’t read that, but I have read another Picoult novel, Sing You Home. The author is known for picking a central issue to address in each work, and in that one it was sexuality. Zoe, a music therapist, is married to Max but leaves him for Vanessa – and then decides to sue him for the use of the embryos they created together via IVF. It was the first book I’d read with that dynamic (a previously straight woman enters into a lesbian partnership), but by no means the last. Later came Untamed by Glennon Doyle, Hidden Nature by Alys Fowler, The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg … and one you maybe weren’t expecting: the fantastic memoir First Time Ever by Peggy Seeger. The authors vary in how they account for it. They were gay all along but didn’t realize it? Their orientation changed? Or they just happened to fall in love with someone of the same gender? Seeger doesn’t explain at all, simply records how head-over-heels she was for Ewan MacColl … and then for Irene Pyper Scott.
#4 Peggy Seeger is one of my heroes these days. I first got into her music through the lockdown livestreams put together by Folk on Foot and have since seen her live and acquired several of her albums, including a Smithsonian Folkways collection of her best-loved folk standards. One of these is, of course, “I’m Gonna Be an Engineer,” which was one of the inspirations for Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground.
#5 Unsettled Ground, an unusual story of rural poverty and illiteracy, is set in a fictional village modelled on Inkpen, where Nicola Chester lives. Her memoir On Gallows Down, which held particular local interest for me, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize last year.
#6 Also shortlisted that year was Wild Fell by Lee Schofield, about his work at RSPB Haweswater. Like Chester, he’s been mired in the struggle to balance sustainable farming with conservation at a beloved place. And like a fellow Lakeland farmer (and previous Wainwright Prize winner for English Pastoral), James Rebanks, he’s trying to be respectful of tradition while also restoring valuable habitats. My husband and I each took a library copy of Wild Fell along to Cumbria last week (about which more anon) and packed it in a backpack for an on-location photo during our wild walk at the very atmospheric Haweswater.
Where will your chain take you? Join us for #6Degrees of Separation! (Hosted on the first Saturday of each month by Kate W. of Books Are My Favourite and Best.) Next month’s starting book is Wifedom by Anna Funder.
Have you read any of my selections? Tempted by any you didn’t know before?
Stanley and Elsie by Nicola Upson & A Visit to Sandham Memorial Chapel
“I don’t want them to look like war paintings, Elsie. I want them to look like heaven.”
When I was offered a copy of this novel to review as part of the blog tour, I was unfamiliar with the name of its subject, the artist Sir Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) – until I realized that he painted the WWI-commemorative Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire, which I had never visited* but knew was just 5.5 miles from our home in Berkshire.
Take another look at the title, though: two characters are given double billing, the second of whom is Elsie Munday, who in the opening chapter presents herself for an interview with Stanley and his wife, Hilda (also a painter), who promptly hire her to be their housemaid at Chapel View in 1928. This creates a setup similar to that in Girl with a Pearl Earring, with a lower-class character observing the inner workings of an artist’s household and giving plain-speaking commentary on what she sees. Upson’s close third-person narration sticks with Elsie for the whole of Part I, but in Part II the picture widens out, with the point of view rotating between Hilda, Elsie and Dorothy Hepworth, the reluctant third side in a love triangle that develops between Stanley and her partner, Patricia Preece.
Hilda and Stanley argue about everything, from childrearing to art: they even paint dueling portraits of Elsie – with Hilda’s Country Girl winning out. Elsie knows she’s lucky to have such a comfortable position with the Spencers and their daughters at Burghclere, and later at Cookham, but she’s uneasy at how Stanley turns her into a confidante in his increasingly tempestuous marriage. Hilda, frustrated at Stanley’s selfish, demanding ways, often returns to her family home in Hampstead, leaving Elsie alone with her employer. Stanley doesn’t give a fig for local opinion, but Elsie knows she has a reputation to protect – especially considering that her moments alone with Stanley aren’t entirely free of sexual tension.
I love reading about artists’ habits – how creative work actually gets done – so I particularly loved the scenes where Elsie, sent on errands, finds Stanley up a ladder in the chapel, pondering how to get a face or object just right. On more than one occasion he borrows her kitchen items, such as a sponge and cooked and uncooked rashers of bacon, so he can render them perfectly in his paintings. I also loved that this is a local interest book for me, with Newbury, where I live, mentioned four or five times in passing as the nearest big town. Part II, with its account of Stanley’s extramarital doings becoming ever more sordid, didn’t grip me as much as Part I, but I found the whole to be an elegantly written study of a very difficult man and the ties that he made and broke over the course of several decades.
For the tone as well as the subject matter, I would particularly recommend it to readers of Jonathan Smith’s Summer in February and Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday, and especially Esther Freud’s Mr. Mac and Me.
My rating:
Stanley and Elsie will be published by Duckworth on May 2nd. My thanks to the publisher for the proof copy for review. They also sent a stylish tote bag!
Nicola Upson
Nicola Upson is best known for her seven Josephine Tey crime novels. She has also published nonfiction, including a book on the sculpture of Helaine Blumenfeld. This is her first stand-alone novel.
*Until now. On a gorgeous Easter Saturday that felt more like summer than spring, I had my husband drop me off on his way to a country walk so I could tour the chapel. I appreciated Spencer’s “holy box” so much more having read the novel than I ever could have otherwise – even though the paintings were nothing like I’d imagined from Upson’s descriptions.
You enter the chapel through the wooden double doors at the center.
What struck me immediately is that, for war art, the focus is so much more on domesticity. Spencer briefly served in Salonika, Macedonia (like his patrons’ brother, Harry Sandham, to whose memory the chapel is dedicated), but had initially been rejected by the army and started off as a medical orderly in an English hospital. Both Salonika and Beaufort hospital appear in the paintings, but there are no battle scenes or bloody injuries. Instead we see tableaux of cooking, doing laundry, making beds, inventorying kitbags, filling canteens, reading maps, dressing under mosquito nets and making stone mosaics. It’s as if Spencer wanted to spotlight what happens in between the fighting. These everyday activities would have typified the soldiers’ lives more than active combat, after all.
I was reminded of how Stanley explains his approach in the novel:
“There’s something heroic in the everyday, don’t you think?”
“Isn’t that what peace is sometimes? A succession of bland moments? We have to cherish them, though, otherwise what was the point of fighting for them?”
The paintings show inventive composition but are in an unusual style that sometimes verges on the grotesque. Many of the figures are lumpen and childlike, especially in Tea in the Hospital Ward, where the soldiers scoffing bread and jam look like cheeky schoolboys. There are lots of animals on display, especially horses and donkeys, but they often look enormous and not entirely realistic. The longer you look, the more details you spot, like a dog raiding a stash of Fray Bentos tins and a young man looking at his reflection in a picture frame to part his hair with a comb. These aren’t desolate, burnt-out landscapes but rich with foliage and blossom, even in Macedonia, which recalls the Holy Land and seems timeless.
The central painting behind the altar, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, imagines the dead rising out of their graves, taking up their white crosses and delivering them to Jesus, a white-clad figure in the middle distance. There’s an Italian Renaissance feeling to this one, with one face in particular looking like it could have come straight out of Giotto (an acknowledged influence on Spencer’s chapel work). It’s as busy as Bosch, but not as dark thematically or in terms of the color scheme – while some of the first paintings in the sequence, like the one of scrubbing hospital floors, recall Edward Hopper with their somber realism. We see all these soldiers intact: at their resurrection they are whole, with no horrific wounds or humiliating nudity. Like Stanley says to Elsie, it’s more heaven than war.
If you are ever in the area, I highly recommend even a quick stop at this National Trust property. I showed a few workers my advanced copy of the novel; while the reception staff were unaware of its existence, a manager I caught up with after my tour knew about it and had plans to read it soon. She also said they will stock it in the NT shop on site.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 