Why the novella deserves more respect

At some point in the past, an unspoken rule emerged in the English-speaking world that an average novel should be around 250 to 350 pages long.

Publishers, agents, and others in the literary universe agreed that this was what they could call “a satisfying length”.

The economics of the publishing industry no doubt had something to do with it, but the result is a lot of novels that are too long for their own good.

These are books that could have been completed in around 200 pages, but have been padded out with subplots, secondary characters, and ruminative passages about the protagonist’s rocky relationship with their family. When you finish reading them, you feel a sense of completion, but also one of relief.

Meanwhile, the novella sits in a corner, waiting to be picked up. Consider the many manifestations of the form: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, and Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, to mention just three. These are not minor works squeezed out during the writers’ free time. In many cases, in fact, they are their defining achievements.

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Henry James, whose The Turn of the Screw is another notable example, called the novella the “beautiful and blest” form. This was his way of lauding the form’s precision and discipline, its refusal to waste a sentence.

Many such works, seen as too long for a short story and too short for a novel, have had an impact out of proportion to their size. Look at Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Orwell’s Animal Farm, or Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. All of them less than 200 pages.

Chances are that if manuscripts of such lengths were submitted today, publishers would send them back asking for a greater word count. Thank goodness that didn’t happen to Srinath Perur’s English translation of Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar, which is less than 150 pages.

Milan Kundera, writing about the novel, demanded “a radical stripping away of unessentials”. He understood the need for condensation, and that length does not always equal complexity. Often, when writers are forced to be brief, it clarifies what they actually want to say.

If, as writer Lorrie Moore is supposed to have said, a short story is a love affair and a novel is a marriage, what is a novella? Perhaps it is what a marriage is supposed to be: an intimate and complete relationship without either party getting on each other’s nerves.

Having said that, there’s no denying that some great novels earn their length. Tolstoy, Hilary Mantel, Vikram Seth: all of them needed space. Epic fantasies may need even more. The argument here isn’t against long novels, it’s against length as a default signal for a novel to be taken seriously.

Japanese fiction has long been comfortable with the short novel as a serious form. Look at the work of Kawabata, Mishima, and Yoko Ogawa, for instance. It’s the land that gave us the haiku, after all. It’s the same with many European countries.

Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s celebrated Chess Story is barely 100 pages. Camus’s The Stranger is about 120 pages. And a notable number of the continent’s acclaimed recent literary works have under 200 pages, too.

After all, what most readers want from a book is to be moved and satisfied. A novella can do all of that and still leave you with time to pick up another one before bedtime. A writer who knows when to stop is removing everything superfluous standing between you and the experience they are trying to create.

The novella is its own distinct achievement, proving yet again the truth of the cliché that less can be more. Don’t look at it as a diminished novel, but as a different and potentially superior form altogether.