The older I get, the more I value short novels. It’s a ratio thing. When I sit down to read, I wonder what percentage of my remaining life will be devoted to the book that is now in my hands. And what percentage of that remaining life am I willing to live vicariously? In college we read War and Peace, a hundred pages a week for nine or ten weeks. I read it all and was impressed with myself. Last year I decided to read it again, just to see how the characters were doing. The second reading was simply a chore. Tolstoy had become long winded–all that theory-of-history stuff! All that editorializing! And Pierre . . . how did Professor Ramsland ever convince us that Pierre was an interesting fellow? Or had Pierre simply become plump and boring from dozing there on my bookshelf all those years? If I were in the book bizz today, I’d put out an edited version of War and Peace–all the lame theorizing would go, and definitely Pierre would be off the team. Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark? I don’t think so–it would be War and Peace without the dumb guy.
From now on, any novel longer than The Great Gatsby will need to have pretty darn good reviews for me to crack it open. Hey, I still have walks to take, dogs to pet.
What are some great short novels? Billy Budd is a classic, as are Heart of Darkness and Miss Lonelyhearts.  A great short novel you might not know about is The Immoralist by Andre Gide. Gide admired Joseph Conrad, and I think they may have met. I don’t know if scholars have talked about it, but the plot of The Immoralist has strange similarities to that of Heart of Darkness. In both stories, someone goes to Africa, where he loses his soul or his character–whatever you want to call it. Gide’s story involves a young married man giving vent to his lust for boys during his honeymoon trip to Algieria. Eventually, and without much remorse, he watches his sick wife die.

Gide and Oscar Wilde spent time together sipping drinks under umbrellas and checking out the boys on the beaches of North Africa. Writing The Immoralist must have been an act of courage for Gide, whereas Wilde sunk into self-pity after being busted. And on the theme of forbidden desire, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is a great short novel. Supposedly, the protagonist is based on Gustave Mahler. If you can’t find a copy of the book, order the Dirk Bogard film from Netflix.

William Styron wrote a good military shorty called The Long March. And a good book I read recently was Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, who also writes children’s books. Desperate Characters focuses on a weekend in the life of a married couple, circa 1970, who have disturbing intimations of a world coming to pieces around them. The tone of the book is masterful, crisp and distrubing. A book that I’m reading right now is The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter. Yesterday, Baxter received a Minnesota Book Award for The Art of Subtext, a discussion of how fiction writers hint at meanings squirming beneath the surface of the plot and the dialogue. Appropriately, The Soul Thief is a good example of fiction erected on subtext. As in Fox’s Desperate Characters, Baxter’s subtext is crawlly and strange.

If you’re over 50, stay away from those heavy Russian novels. You’re too old to be impressed with yourself for wrestling with one, and you might hurt yourself. Brothers Karamazov? Read the Cliff Notes. Anna Karenina? See the Garbo movie, which sensibly cuts one of literature’s dullest subplots–something about peasants and politics. You can read a two-hundred page novel in a couple of days, and then devote the following three or four strictly to reality–buy your wife a present, watch the grandkids play ball, shoot the bull with the guys.

Life is short, and that’s how a novel should be.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Novels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.