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
Short Stories in September, Part II: Brautigan, Doyle, Minot, Simpson
Every time I do this self-set challenge, I am amazed anew by how different short story collections can be in mood and theme – even if their overall concerns are the same as in most fiction: life and death, relationships, identity, choices. Today I have one debut work, two new-to-me authors, and a disappointing showing from an old favourite.
Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962–1970 by Richard Brautigan (1972)
There are more than five dozen stories in this slim volume, most just one to three pages and in the first person (55 of 62); bizarre or matter-of-fact slices of life in the Pacific Northwest or California, often with a grandiose title that’s then contradicted by the banality of the contents (e.g., in the three-page “A Short History of Religion in California,” some deer hunters encounter a group of Christian campers). The simple declarative sentences and mentions of drinking and hunting made me think of Carver and Hemingway, but Brautigan is funnier, coming out with the occasional darkly comic zinger. Here’s “The Scarlatti Tilt” in its entirety: “‘It’s very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who’s learning to play the violin.’ That’s what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.”
In the absurdist “Homage to the San Francisco YMCA,” a man replaces his plumbing with poetry: “He took out his bathtub and put in William Shakespeare. The bathtub did not know what was happening. He took out his kitchen sink and put in Emily Dickinson. The kitchen sink could only stare back in wonder.” Brautigan has an incomer’s admiration for California: “I come from someplace else and was gathered to the purpose of California like a metal-eating flower gathers the sunshine.” Many of the flash stories feel autobiographical and bridge country and city life with themes of bear hunting versus movie-going and riding buses.
There are some macho attitudes towards women, who are generally objects of male desire rather than subjects in their own right. But I appreciated this flash fiction collection for its unexpected metaphors and tonal range, from the over-the-top humour of “Complicated Banking Problems” to a pathos-filled rundown of a life in “The World War I Los Angeles Aeroplane.” (Secondhand – Westwood Books, Sedbergh, 2023)
I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle (2023)
A debut collection of 16 stories, three of them returning to the same sibling trio. Many of Doyle’s characters are young people who still define themselves by the experiences and romances of their college years. In “That Is Shocking,” Margaret can’t get over the irony of her ex breaking up with her on Valentine’s Day after giving her a plate of heart-shaped scones. Former roommates Christine and Daisy are an example of fading friendship in “Two Pisces Emote about the Passage of Time.”
The title phrase comes from “Cinnamon Baseball Coyote,” one of the Helen–Grace–Evan stories, when the sparring sisters are children and the one writes down “I hate my sister” and saves the paper in her desk because, as she tells their father, “I don’t mean it anymore. I only kept it because I meant it once.” Moments of great drama or emotion, and the regret that comes in their aftermath, are the stuff of these mainly New York City-set stories.
Across nine first-person and seven third-person stories, the content and point of view are pretty samey and minor; nothing here to make you feel you’re reading a rising star of American fiction. I only found a few standouts. “Hello It’s You” is about Meg’s history of same-sex partners: though she’s with Sara now, she can’t stop thinking about Jenny, her college girlfriend. “Aren’t We Lucky” has a soupçon of magic as it imagines a house and its ghosts resisting renovations. But my favourite was “Moments Earlier,” about Kelly’s medical crisis and the friends who never get past it. 
With thanks to Corsair for the free copy for review. See also Susan’s review.
Why I Don’t Write and Other Stories by Susan Minot (2020)
Minot was new to me (as was Brautigan). These stories were first published between 1991 and 2019, so they span a good chunk of her career. “Polepole” depicts a short-lived affair between two white people in Kenya, one of whom seems to have a dated colonial attitude. In “The Torch,” a woman with dementia mistakes her husband for an old flame. “Occupied” sees Ivy cycling past the NYC Occupy camp on her way to pick up her daughter. The title story, published at LitHub in 2018, is a pithy list of authorial excuses. “Listen” is a nebulous set of lines of unattributed speech that didn’t add up to much for me. “The Language of Cats and Dogs” reminded me of Mary Gaitskill in tone, as a woman remembers her professor’s inappropriate behaviour 40 years later.
Eight of the stories are in the third person and two in the first person. They’re almost all accomplished in terms of scene setting and creating characters and motivations, but I can’t say Minot won me over such that I’ll seek out more of her work. Only a few stories will stay with me: “Green Glass,” in which a man encounters his ex-girlfriend at a wedding and cuts her down to size in a way that alarms his current partner; “Boston Common at Twilight,” an account of a strange but ultimately non-consensual sexual encounter; and my favourite, “Café Mort,” the only one with a speculative edge, about an establishment that only serves the dead. (New bargain purchase – Dollar Tree, Hagerstown, Maryland, 2023)
Hey Yeah Right Get a Life by Helen Simpson (2000)
This was my sixth collection from Simpson, who only appears to write short fiction. This was one of my least favourite of her books, unfortunately, because her common theme of frazzled mothers trying to balance parenting with career felt tired. The title story is about Dorrie, mum of three, and this set of characters recurs in the final piece, “Hurrah for the Hols.” Simpson does get the mindset just right:
She had to be thinking of other people all the time or the whole thing fell apart.
I can’t see how the family would work if I let myself start wanting things again, thought Dorrie; give me an inch and I’d run a mile, that’s what I’m afraid of.
The whole pattern of family life hung for a vivid moment above the chopping board as a seamless cycle of nourishment and devoural.
It was like being on holiday with Punch and Judy – lots of biffing and shrieking and fights over sausages.
But I’ve read too many of her exasperated-mum stories at this point. Two here were about female bankers. One, “Burns and the Bankers,” set at a seemingly endless Burns Night supper, rather outstayed its welcome and made overly obvious its message about this being a man’s field. Do read Simpson, but maybe not this (despite the amazing title); I’d recommend Four Bare Legs in a Bed or In the Driver’s Seat (UK title: Constitutional) instead. (Secondhand – Books for Amnesty, York, 2023)
I’ll have one more set of reviews and a roundup on the last day of the month.
Currently reading: If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery; The Best Short Stories 2023: The O. Henry Prize Winners, ed. Lauren Groff; How to Disappear by Tara Masih; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro; The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer; Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, ed. Christine Park; Small, Burning Things by Cathy Ulrich
The Mystery of Henri Pick by David Foenkinos (Walter Presents Blog Tour)
A library populated entirely by rejected books? Such was Richard Brautigan’s brainchild in one of his novels, and after his suicide a fan made it a reality. Now based in Vancouver, Washington, the Brautigan Library houses what French novelist David Foenkinos calls “the world’s literary orphans.” In The Mystery of Henri Pick, he imagines what would have happened had a French librarian created its counterpart in a small town in Brittany and a canny editor discovered a gem of a bestseller among its dusty stacks.
Delphine Despero is a rising Parisian editor who’s fallen in love with her latest signed author, Frédéric Koskas. Unfortunately, his novel The Bathtub is a flop, but he persists in writing a second, The Bed. On a trip home to Brittany so Frédéric can meet her parents, he and Delphine drop into the library of rejected books at Crozon and find a few amusing turkeys – but also a masterpiece. The Last Hours of a Love Affair is what it says on the tin, but also incorporates the death of Pushkin. The name attached to it is that of the late pizzeria owner in Crozon. His elderly widow and middle-aged daughter had no idea that their humble Henri had ever had literary ambitions, let alone that he had a copy of Eugene Onegin in the attic.
The Last Hours of a Love Affair becomes a publishing sensation – for its backstory more than its writing quality – yet there are those who doubt that Henri Pick could have been its author. The doubting faction is led by Jean-Michel Rouche, a disgraced literary critic who, having lost his job and his girlfriend, now has all the free time in the world to research the foundation of the Library of Rejects and those who deposited manuscripts there. Just when you think matters are tied up, Foenkinos throws a curveball.
This was such a light and entertaining read that I raced through. It has the breezy, mildly zany style I associate with films like Amélie. Despite the title, there’s not that much of a mystery here, but that suited me since I pretty much never pick up a crime novel. Foenkinos inserts lots of little literary in-jokes (not least: this is published by Pushkin Press!), and through Delphine he voices just the jaded but hopeful attitude I have towards books, especially as I undertake my own project of assessing unpublished manuscripts:
She had about twenty books to read during August, and they were all stored on her e-reader. [Her friends] asked her what those novels were about, and Delphine confessed that, most of the time, she was incapable of summarizing them. She had not read anything memorable. Yet she continued to feel excited at the start of each new book. Because what if it was good? What if she was about to discover a new author? She found her job so stimulating, it was almost like being a child again, hunting for chocolate eggs in a garden at Easter.
Great fun – give it a go!
My rating:
(Originally published in 2016. Translation from the French by Sam Taylor, 2020.)
My thanks to Poppy at Pushkin Press for arranging my e-copy for review.
(Walter Presents, a foreign-language drama streaming service, launched in the UK (on Channel 4) in 2016 and is also available in the USA, Australia, and various European countries.)
I was delighted to be part of the Walter Presents blog tour. See below for details of where other books and reviews have featured.
Book Serendipity, September to October 2021
I call it Book Serendipity when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something pretty bizarre in common. Because I have so many books on the go at once (usually 20–30), I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. I’ve realized that, of course, synchronicity is really the more apt word, but this branding has stuck. This used to be a quarterly feature, but to keep the lists from getting too unwieldy I’ve shifted to bimonthly.
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- Young people studying An Inspector Calls in Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi and Heartstoppers, Volume 4 by Alice Oseman.
- China Room (Sunjeev Sahota) was immediately followed by The China Factory (Mary Costello).
- A mention of acorn production being connected to the weather earlier in the year in Light Rains Sometimes Fall by Lev Parikian and Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler.
- The experience of being lost and disoriented in Amsterdam features in Flesh & Blood by N. West Moss and Yearbook by Seth Rogen.
- Reading a book about ravens (A Shadow Above by Joe Shute) and one by a Raven (Fox & I by Catherine Raven) at the same time.
- Speaking of ravens, they’re also mentioned in The Elements by Kat Lister, and the Edgar Allan Poe poem “The Raven” was referred to and/or quoted in both of those books plus 100 Poets by John Carey.
- A trip to Mexico as a way to come to terms with the death of a loved one in This Party’s Dead by Erica Buist (read back in February–March) and The Elements by Kat Lister.
- Reading from two Carcanet Press releases that are Covid-19 diaries and have plague masks on the cover at the same time: Year of Plagues by Fred D’Aguiar and 100 Days by Gabriel Josipovici. (Reviews of both coming up soon.)
- Descriptions of whaling and whale processing and a summary of the Jonah and the Whale story in Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs and The Woodcock by Richard Smyth.
An Irish short story featuring an elderly mother with dementia AND a particular mention of her slippers in The China Factory by Mary Costello and Blank Pages and Other Stories by Bernard MacLaverty.
- After having read two whole nature memoirs set in England’s New Forest (Goshawk Summer by James Aldred and The Circling Sky by Neil Ansell), I encountered it again in one chapter of A Shadow Above by Joe Shute.
- Cranford is mentioned in Corduroy by Adrian Bell and Cut Out by Michèle Roberts.
- Kenneth Grahame’s life story and The Wind in the Willows are discussed in On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester and The Elements by Kat Lister.
- Reading two books by a Jenn at the same time: Ghosted by Jenn Ashworth and The Other Mothers by Jenn Berney.
- A metaphor of nature giving a V sign (that’s equivalent to the middle finger for you American readers) in On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester and Light Rains Sometimes Fall by Lev Parikian.
- Quince preserves are mentioned in The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo and Light Rains Sometimes Fall by Lev Parikian.
- There’s a gooseberry pie in Talking to the Dead by Helen Dunmore and The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo.
- The ominous taste of herbicide in the throat post-spraying shows up in On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester and Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson.
- People’s rude questioning about gay dads and surrogacy turns up in The Echo Chamber by John Boyne and the DAD anthology from Music.Football.Fatherhood.
- A young woman dresses in unattractive secondhand clothes in The Echo Chamber by John Boyne and Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney.
- A mention of the bounty placed on crop-eating birds in medieval England in Orchard by Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates and A Shadow Above by Joe Shute.
- Hedgerows being decimated, and an account of how mistletoe is spread, in On Gallows Down by Nicola Chester and Orchard by Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates.
Ukrainian secondary characters in Ghosted by Jenn Ashworth and The Echo Chamber by John Boyne; minor characters named Aidan in the Boyne and Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney.
- Listening to a dual-language presentation and observing that the people who know the original language laugh before the rest of the audience in The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo and Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney.
- A character imagines his heart being taken out of his chest in Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica and The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki.
- A younger sister named Nina in Talking to the Dead by Helen Dunmore and Sex Cult Nun by Faith Jones.
- Adulatory words about George H.W. Bush in The Echo Chamber by John Boyne and Thinking Again by Jan Morris.
- Reading three novels by Australian women at the same time (and it’s rare for me to read even one – availability in the UK can be an issue): Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, The Performance by Claire Thomas, and The Weekend by Charlotte Wood.
- There’s a couple who met as family friends as teenagers and are still (on again, off again) together in Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason and Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney.
- The Performance by Claire Thomas is set during a performance of the Samuel Beckett play Happy Days, which is mentioned in 100 Days by Gabriel Josipovici.
Human ashes are dumped and a funerary urn refilled with dirt in Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica and Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith.
- Nicholas Royle (whose White Spines I was also reading at the time) turns up on a Zoom session in 100 Days by Gabriel Josipovici.
- Richard Brautigan is mentioned in both The Mystery of Henri Pick by David Foenkinos and White Spines by Nicholas Royle.
- The Wizard of Oz and The Railway Children are part of the plot in The Book Smugglers (Pages & Co., #4) by Anna James and mentioned in Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 