Short Novels to Dip Into This Summer
You can stumble into them and stumble back out, enriched, a few hours later.
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Reading short novels and encountering a range of characters’ worlds in quick succession can be a singular pleasure, especially in the summertime.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Taut and Potent
My most controversial opinion is that most books should be either 100 or 1,000 pages. I am joking, obviously—sort of. Length is not a good proxy for quality, and a story should take the time it demands. But after years of gravitating toward baggy narrative journeys, I have lately become enchanted by novellas.
I admire short novels largely because I love witnessing the skill that goes into achieving an efficient word-to-idea ratio. But I also find it a lot of fun, especially in the summer, to dip into varied lives in rapid succession. I am not the only one turning to sparse texts: As Kate Dwyer reported in Esquire last week, slim volumes are having a moment. Dwyer identifies “a desire among general audiences for the concise, intense books that have been gaining momentum in the literary fiction and nonfiction categories in recent years.” She reports that Annie Ernaux’s Nobel win last fall played a role in calcifying the prestige of potent, short works.
I don’t think short books have intrinsic merit any more than long ones do. In recent years, I have read a number of sub-200-page novels that I found insufferable (another benefit of a short book: If it’s bad, it’s over soon). But many of the good ones, in my experience, rely on an intriguing sense of disorientation. The short novel can be an ideal format for narrative swerves.
Yesterday afternoon, lying in front of a box fan awaiting the humid summer rain, I finished Hanna Bervoets’s We Had to Remove This Post, a taut, haunting novel that weighs in at 144 pages. In the book, readers follow a content moderator as she navigates gory posts on the social-media site she works with and applies content rules that often feel arbitrary. This novel, in its singular focus on vulnerable workers and their relationships with one another, laces in a neat indictment of the corporation looming in the background. But the story is not about the technology, not really. It’s about the workers who suffer because of it. And late in the book, we discover darkness rooted more deeply in the protagonist than was apparent at the start. “You don’t get it, do you?” a former lover asks our narrator, confronting her. (As a reader, I too did not get it—until I did!)
By total coincidence, last month I finished another slim psychological novel in which our narrator is repeatedly told “You just don’t get it” by an ex: Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (163 pages). I will not pretend that this echo is meaningful to anyone besides me. But that’s part of the fun of reading short novels back to back: the delight of building a constellation of references and patterns only apparent to oneself. You can do this with any type of book, in theory. But reading a bunch of slight texts back to back is a sure way to swiftly build up your own arsenal.
If you are looking for some short novels to get you started, here are a few I’ve read and loved over the past year. I think near-constantly about Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino and Sagittarius, paired novellas about two fraught family relationships. In Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, which follows a boarding-school girl in Switzerland, death lurks on each of the 101 pages. Adrian Nathan West’s My Father’s Diet, the hilarious tale of a young man whose divorced dad gets into powerlifting, is packaged in the perfect container for the scope of the story: 176 pages.
Short novels are even sneaking into works of long, complex fiction: In Lucy Ives’s labyrinthine Life Is Everywhere, the protagonist’s eerie novella, a riff on Hamlet, pops up hundreds of pages in. (And to continue the theme of fun personal tie-ins, I am currently in the midst of another uncanny and wry retelling of Hamlet, this time from the point of view of a fetus: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, which at 208 pages is on the longer end of what I’d consider truly short.)
In spite of my zeal for short books, I still mostly read longer novels. This year, I moved away from Goodreads, which I only ever updated haphazardly, seeking to gain privacy and stanch the flow of my personal data to Amazon. Now I track what I read in a spreadsheet. A bit of number-crunching tells me that the average length of the books I’ve read in print this year is 256 pages. That strikes me as a truly average length. (I also found it sort of fun, looking back at my reading list, to find that I read three books that are exactly 288 pages this spring.) Everything in moderation including moderation, I suppose. I love a short novel whose every page promises to be thick with meaning, and I love a shaggy epic full of beautiful prose. I feel grateful, as a reader, to have such a range to choose from.
One more note of praise for the short novel: Part of the joy is that you can stumble into them and stumble back out, enriched, a few hours later. About a year ago, meaning to order the entire Copenhagen Trilogy, I accidentally ordered just the first volume. Childhood, by Tove Ditlevsen, arrived on my doorstep, all 99 pages of it. I was disappointed at first to realize my error. But then I read the book in maybe two sittings. It was lovely and brief. At some point I will probably read the other two volumes. But for now, I am content.
Related:
Today’s News
- Israeli forces launched drone strikes and deployed hundreds of troops in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. It’s their largest military operation in the region in almost two decades.
- Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen plans to visit Beijing later this week to ease tensions between the United States and China.
- At least two shooters attacked a block party in Baltimore yesterday, wounding 28 people and killing two.
Dispatches
- The Good Word: Our crossword-puzzle editor explains the thinking behind our new, diabolically difficult print puzzle.
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Evening Read
Hip-Hop’s Midlife Slump
By Xochitl Gonzalez
In the summer of 1998, the line to get into Mecca on a Sunday night might stretch from the entrance to the Tunnel nightclub on Manhattan’s 12th Avenue all the way to the end of the block; hundreds of bodies, clothed and barely clothed in Versace and DKNY and Polo Sport, vibrating with anticipation. Passing cars with their booming stereos, either scoping out the scene or hunting for parking, offered a preview of what was inside: the sounds of Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Kim. These people weren’t waiting just to listen to music. They were there to be part of it. To be in the room where Biggie Smalls and Mary J. Blige had performed. To be on the dance floor when Funkmaster Flex dropped a bomb on the next summer anthem. They were waiting to be at the center of hip-hop.
What they didn’t realize was that the center of hip-hop had shifted.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Domenico Starnone’s novel The House on Via Gemito explores the psychic toll of class mobility.
Watch. Choose from 11 undersung TV shows that our culture writers wish had received more attention this year.
Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.
P.S.
I somehow totally missed the high-seas literary romp Let Them All Talk when the movie came out in 2020, so it was to my great pleasure and amusement that I ended up watching it on a long flight last fall. In case you also missed it: Basically, a novelist (Meryl Streep!) is sent on a transatlantic voyage, and her agent (Gemma Chan!) secretly follows her aboard to try to find out what’s going on with her next book. Streep brings along her nephew, played by the charming Lucas Hedges, and she’s also joined by two friends, because why not? Antics of a sort, along with conversations about literary ethics and making a life as a writer, ensue on board. The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, was shot on the Queen Mary 2, and the actors improvise atop the story, which was written by Deborah Eisenberg. It’s a funny, if kind of unwieldy, tale that combines many elements I enjoy. I recommend it (streaming on Max) to supplement your short-novel reading on this holiday not-quite-weekend.
— Lora
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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.