Too long, didn’t read: why the short novel is making a comeback
Last year, I deleted social media apps from my phone. All those five minutes here, 10 minutes there, were accumulating into too much time wasted faffing about online. I went back to carrying a book in my bag instead, which I hadn’t done in years. But the novels in my reading pile at the time — looking at you, Kate Atkinson and Paul Auster — were too heavy to lug around, so I put together a bag-friendly stash, mainly second-hand vintage Penguins such as Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Since then, I tend to have two books on the go at once. Shorties go out, tomes stay home.
hen the six Booker Prize finalists were announced in early September, many commentators noted that this year’s shortlist was aptly named: Claire Keegan’s remarkable Small Things Like These, clocking in at 116 pages, is the shortest book ever to be included. (Fellow shortlistee Treacle Walker by Alan Garner has more pages, yet an even lower word count.) Reviews and Booker commentary constantly referenced the brevity of Treacle Walker and Small Things Like These. So size does matter, but to whom? Publisher, reader, author — or all three?
Rónán Hession hopes that the Booker shortlist will open publishers’ minds on the subject of short books. Panenka, the follow-up to his heartwarming debut Leonard and Hungry Paul is 50,000 words, “which is considered short for a novel these days”.
He thinks publishers are terrified of short books “because they think people won’t buy them, in spite of regular reader groans at badly edited 300-pagers” and it concerns him that writers feel pressure to hit a word count, “though it seems common that publishers expect them to”.
As a reviewer, he has come across “countless examples of promising books ruined by the writer not knowing when to stop, or maybe not having the freedom to do so”.
Lisa Coen, publisher at Tramp Press, would agree. “It’s almost always the case that a book could be shorter, in my experience.” She and co-founder Sarah Davis-Goff work to the premise that “a manuscript sets its own rules, and we look at each one and ask if it is abiding by them. If a story can be told in 20 pages, or 400, and it’s doing that well, then we’re happy.” Tramp’s most recent publication is the raw, visceral novel Where I End by Sophie White, which packs a lot into a short size.
Coen believes publishers drive fashions for long versus short fiction. “The more commercial side of publishing will follow the trend of cheap, short paperbacks when it sees those sell well. It’ll offer thick pop science books in airport shops when it sees that do well, and it’ll dutifully turn out serialised romance novels when it realises there’s an appetite for that too.”
She believes “the industry does a lot of things because ‘that’s how it’s always been done’ and is annoyingly slow to realise that readers are adaptable”.
Industry standards are a matter of fashion, paper and logistics. In the 18th century, the customary length was three hardback volumes. In the middle of the 19th century, advances in printing press technology made it easier to publish novels of varying lengths. Readers enjoyed weekly serialisations, which in turn encouraged authors to keep a story running, and libraries lent novels that had been published in parts.
Publishing as an industry can be slow to adapt to change. “I think the pressure on printing costs will cause publishers to be less ambitious to publish longer books”, says Coen noting that through a combination of the “paper shortage and Brexit-related delivery problems that everyone is experiencing now, authors may find less enthusiasm among publishers for very long books which present cost and logistics challenges to bring to market.”
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Rónán Hession: ‘There are countless examples of promising books ruined by the writer not knowing when to stop, or maybe not having the freedom to do so’
A dogged insistence on fixed formats is at odds with today’s readers, who have many other distractions and diversions at hand.
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Many publishers specify a word count in writers’ contracts. While it varies from genre to genre, the ‘average’ commercial novel is about 90,000 words, and how-to writing guides and blogs are full of imperious admonishments to new writers about the importance of hitting specified targets. And, yes, while 90,000 can be a sweet spot for telling a story well, when I’m writing a novel, it feels arbitrary, even unhelpful, to be keeping an eye on the tally, as if it were a school essay.
For Philip McGowan, professor of American literature at Queen’s University Belfast, a short novel “is the equivalent of binge-watching a single season of a favourite programme in one day.”
He cites “the perennial discussion in English departments at universities everywhere: should we set shorter books because otherwise students won’t read them?”
Sarah Moss, assistant professor of creative writing at UCD’s School of English, Drama and Film, says that “academics have a loose category of ‘short enough to teach’, meaning that enough of the class will read enough of it in a week.”
The Great Gatsby, which is just under 200 pages, is often cited as the great American novel. McGowan edited the Penguin US edition and is currently editing the Routledge Companion to F Scott Fitzgerald, a new collection of essays scheduled to coincide with Gatsby’s centenary in 2025. “Perfection is never a term I could apply to anything,” he says, yet agrees that The Great Gatsby comes close. He describes the novel as , which he describes as “romantic idealism meets American reality, with not a syllable to spare”.
Pacing is key to the success of a short novel, as is the time period covered by the text, he says. “Gatsby spans continents and histories, though all within that riotous summer of 1922, somehow.” One could feasibly connect the success or otherwise of short fictions to the Aristotelian unities (of time, place and action), but such framing would do a disservice to so many short novels that are filled with subplots and apparently background details that come more and more to the fore on a second, or further, reading.”
Award-winning author Kathleen MacMahon, whose fourth novel The Home Scar will be published by Penguin in February, says she would love to write a short novel, “but it takes more skill than I have, and more patience. I can only imagine there’s a world of editing in paring it back.” For her, “the substance and scope of the story should be disproportionate to its length, otherwise it’s just a long short story. To warrant the title of short novel, it needs to punch above its weight.”
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Kathleen MacMahon: ‘To warrant the title of short novel, it needs to punch above its weight’. Photo by Steve Humphreys
As a writer, she says her books find their own shape. As a reader, she believes, “it’s all about the weight of it in your hand — a short novel should fit easily into your pocket and be effortless to read while lying on your back in bed. Ideally, 100 pages, but I would stretch as far as 200”.
Sarah Moss, who has published six acclaimed novels, falls into this category. Her most recent, the pandemic response The Fell (2021) is under 200 pages, and even shorter again is Ghost Wall (2018), a high-wire of a story whose brevity ensures you can completely lose yourself in it, cover-to-cover, in a single sitting. With short fiction, she believes, “your promise to the reader is a bit like that of a short story: this needs to be intense and deliberate, and there’s little room for anything decorative”.
When it comes to novels in translation, Rónán Hession says: “There can be long delays in translation — decades even — so trends are hard to read… It can be hard to know the underlying reasons. For example, some countries still have serialisation, where books are published in instalments in magazines, and then become short novels.”
The Akutagawa and Naoki prizes, the main Japanese literary awards for new writers, often go to shorter books, and short Japanese novels in translation are common.
Philip McGowan believes we need to “relearn the ways of making time for novel reading.” Doing so through shorter fiction is a logical starting point, so where better than Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These? Written with exacting precision, it has done more to display the range and power of the short novel than any other here this year. What’s extraordinary about it, according to MacMahon, is how Keegan manages to tell such a huge, resonant story with such elegant brevity. Coen agrees. “It’s incredible to me how much of the life of the town, and the lives of her characters she implies within so few pages.”
Last week, some writer friends were chatting about the implosion of Twitter — the most book-friendly social media — and wondering what platform to move to. What if the answer is: none. There’s a lot to be said for ditching the socials, popping a book in your pocket, and enjoying the big impact of short fiction.
Recommended fiction to devour in one sitting
One of the many joys of short fiction is that you can read a wide range easily. If you’d like to start with classics, I recommend my long-time pals The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford and A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. My recent favourites include Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight and Jan Carson’s beautiful caravan-park novel The Last Resort.
Gwen Allman, owner of independent Dublin bookshop The Company of Books, says that the popularity of Small Things Like These has sent readers to Claire Keegan’s back catalogue with noticeable increases in requests for Foster and Antarctica. Also selling well at the moment are Voting Day by Clare O’Dea, The Fell by Sarah Moss and, another of my favourites, Nora Ephron’s wonderful Heartburn. She also stocks plenty of older short fiction, including Truman Capote’s first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.
Rónán Hession, whose third novel Ghost Mountain is scheduled for publication in 2024, was introduced to Japanese fiction by the short classic Botchan by Natsume Sõseki, translated by J Cohn. One of his favourite books this year was Canzone Di Guerra by the late Croatian writer Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth, and he also recommends Proleterka by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Alastair McEwen.
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Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms was published in 1948
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder is “a very clever idea for a novel, telling the individual histories of five people who all meet the same fate when a bridge in Peru collapses,” says Kathleen MacMahon. Especially tantalising for those of us (me included) who haven’t read it yet, she adds: “It also has one of my favourite last lines in fiction.” She also enjoyed The Wife by Meg Wolitzer as “a brilliant story, told with a very sharp wit. It does everything it needs to do in a small number of pages. I also loved The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante. She creates both present and past for her main character, as well as a fascinating cast of supporting characters and a vivid location, while also saying something new and important about motherhood.”
Read anything by Ted Chiang, suggests Lisa Coen, especially Story of Your Life. “Chiang has a way of playing with science, linguistics and philosophy in deeply human stories that are populated with characters you care about.” She also thinks highly of The Iron Age by Arja Kajermo (with images by Susanna Kajermo Törner), a dark fairy tale-style novel about a family’s upheaval from their home in post-war Finland to a strange new life in Sweden. “The dry wit of her narration creates a vivid version of the world that feels complex and substantial,” Coen says, “and she does it all in 118 pages!”
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle are go-tos for Sarah Moss. Philip McGowan is another long-time fan of We Have Always Lived in the Castle: “What a book: unsettling, evocative, gripping from the opening lines — how can you not read on and on?”
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/too-long-didnt-read-why-the-short-novel-is-making-a-comeback-42152233.html Too long, didn’t read: why the short novel is making a comeback