Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.
Literary critic and translator Lily Meyer argues with a previous Dirt issue.
Novellas! Like Daisy Alioto, I love them and want publishers to buy more of them. I wish bookstore shelves overflowed with them—though there would be no overflowing, really, since novellas are so elegantly small. Every fiction writer I know loves them. (In fairness, nearly every fiction writer I know, myself included, has written or is writing one, so we may have some collective bias here.) Novellas are the freaks and geeks of literature: visual misfits unwilling to conform. Some play nice in story collections; others insist on living on their own. Some are genuinely weird to the core; others, once approached, reveal themselves to be perfect, self-sufficient little gems.
Perfection and weirdness are, by me, the two literary qualities ideally suited to the novella. Weirdness and experimentation, if permitted to go on too long, can get annoying; perfection always gets annoying eventually. A 300-page novel without quirks, flaws, or wildness is suffocating and awful, but an 85-page novella without a single off-kilter image or oddly-chosen word? Admirable. Impressive. A delight. Consider Natasha Brown’s forthcoming début novella Assembly, in which every sentence practically vibrates with suppressed emotion. Brown has whittled the book down to perfection: even the slightest bit of extra length would slacken its taut voice. Consider, too, the general works of Philip Roth, who, canonical though he may now be, is a bizarre sex fiend of a writer—with one exception: his novella “Goodbye, Columbus,” which is beautifully behaved and formally flawless. If its sweet, semi-repressed class-struggle romance were novel-length, it would be completely boring. As it stands, it’s one of the best doomed-love stories ever written.
In 1969, “Goodbye, Columbus” got adapted into a forgettable movie in which the actors constantly seem to be giving the camera side-eye. It flattens class differences into décor differences and does, overall, no justice to the novella. How could it? You can’t adapt perfection. Nor can you adapt true weirdness, unless you want to tame it into kitsch. This is why I find myself compelled to disagree, kindly and lovingly, with Daisy’s suggestion that novellas are excellent streaming-adaptation fodder.
Novellas—good ones, I mean, ones fulfilling their God-given role—are actually the least adaptable type of fiction. It is their nature to refuse to conform. A nice well-crafted short story that adheres to literary convention? Great for adaptation. A story collection? The Coen brothers already adapted one. A sprawly intergenerational novel? Miniseries, by all means. But novellas deserve to be read and appreciated for themselves, then permitted to wander off into the sunset. IP vultures, leave them be. — By Lily Meyer