Short Novels? Novellas? Unclassifiables?

One of the reasons I was lax about blogging during May and June was that--grades having been turned in at the start of May--I was busy writing a novella. At least, that's how I'm currently classifying it. The novel I wrote last summer-fall began as what I thought would be a novella but ended up as a shortish novel (66,000 words) but the spring project definitely stayed in what's generally considered to be novella range (27,000 words). It's set in the exact period I was living through--pandemic and protest--and I think it's at its correct length. It has now been submitted to a couple of novella contests and we'll see what happens (and if I find anywhere else appropriate to submit a piece of that length).

Meanwhile, I've discovered an interesting set of blog posts by Katherine Luck that consider what would constitute the shortest novel, versus constituting a novella or a short story or something else. She embarked on this topic as a result of having written what she supposes to be a novella, The Drowned Town, and her opening blog post is here, "What Is the Shortest Novel Ever Written?" She then considers the question in a more thematic way, focusing her posts on individual items that have been proposed to be very short novels.

She says:

In the interest of classifying The Drowned Town correctly and helping all of us find out, once and for all, the difference between a short story, a novella, and a novel, I’ve put together my own list of extremely short books that claim to be novels. I’m going to read ‘em and report back to you. Here are the top ten contenders for shortest novel of all time:

Wenjack by Joseph Boyden
Snoopy and “It was a Dark and Stormy Night” by Charles M. Schulz
The Comedian by Joseph O’Connor
Master of Miniatures by Jim Shepard
Scars on the Soul by Françoise Sagan
Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion by V.S. Naipaul
The Circling Song by Nawal El Saadawi
I Lock my Door Upon Myself by Joyce Carol Oates
The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
A Small Place by Jamaica Kinkaid

In discussing Wenjack, she considers the role of length, and whether Wenjack is really a novel or actually a short story.

In looking at Snoopy and “It was a Dark and Stormy Night”, she tackles medium and whether graphic novels and other visual forms can really be called novels. Here, I have to say that if we're wondering whether graphic novels are truly novels, it doesn't help to use a collection of "Peanuts" cartoons as the example, but I guess the book was marketed as a novel (why?).

Her analysis of The Comedian considers whether the age or literacy level of the intended audience makes any difference in calling a book a novel. With this one, which she finds satisfyingly novel-complex yet very short, the question arises as to how we differentiate novel from novella (and in word count, The Comedian is shorter than what most people would say constitutes a novella, let alone a novel!).

Moving on to Master of Miniatures, Luck considers the role of marketing in determining how a book is perceived. Here, in addition to looking at how Master of Miniatures was blurbed by its small press, she puts forth two opposing options for marketing the Danish band Týr's song “Ragnars Kvæði,” based on a traditional Faroese ballad about a seventh-century king. (I've gotta say that I'm immediately interested in any rock band that works with "a traditional Faroese ballad about a seventh-century king" whereas I don't have the slightest desire to hear "hardcore music of magic runes, merciless plunder, and jacked-up warriors in furs," but that's me and I'm not the typical reader.)

With Scars on the Soul, Luck examines the question of complexity and whether works that include memoir and/or autobiography--especially memoir, as it is more concentrated than autobiography--can be seen as novels. We know, of course, that many novels (and novellas, and short stories) are autobiographical to some extent, whether or not the author admits it. But since Luck is contemplating what makes a novel a novel, she asks "Is Scars on the Soul a novel? A memoir within a novel? A short story with autobiographical annotations?" and "Is it a single complex narrative, or a composite of two simple texts?" From a technical standpoint, these are great questions to ask. And now I really want to read Scars on the Soul! I read Françoise Sagan's first and most famous book, Bonjour Tristesse, in my teens but can't say I recall that much about it.

In her next installment, Luck deviates from her original list and goes to Koula by Menis Koumandareas to contemplate genre and whether that matters. But--(is this a spoiler? I don't think so) she decides Koula is neither genre fiction nor a novel. On to...

Literary fiction and I Lock my Door Upon Myself. Yeah, she's skipped some books on the original lineup. Well, these things develop. Here she says "Literary fiction breaks many of the publishing industry’s rules of genre novel writing. But is length the one rule that can’t be broken?" I Lock my Door Upon Myself is 23,000 words and Luck judges it a novel, without explaining why it is not a novella.

Next up is Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. That post apparently hasn't appeared yet. Meanwhile, you can get a free copy of Luck's possible novella, The Drowned Town, at The Delve.

I don't feel any particular anxiety regarding whether my own novella is really a novella or a novel--it's definitely not a short story and I'm okay with using its length to define it--but I'm enjoying these moments of attempted categorization, probably because I kind of like reading Jan Mukařovský on structuralism and aesthetics. But don't let that scare you off reading what Luck has to say, just read her posts in order and they will be good fun.