The novella is the ideal form of the novel, just as the short lyric poem is the best sort of poetry - for a reason that is self-evident: brevity. Or rather, brevity by way of compression. And not just pounds-per-square-inch. The balance between the demands of the author, and the needs of the reader, seem to find equipoise in the novella - which can be read in one sitting, in one moment and place, just as much as a poem can, or a piece of music may be listened to.While longer works of writing have their different values and charms, one of them, surely, is the function of being able to be "picked up" later. There is no later in a novella - there is the enveloping sense of a dying movement, a now turning into a then, as one flows with the work itself. The novella is the glance at the painting that turns into the look that's held by wanting to see more, but also knows the gallery will be closed in an hour. Its dance with the finite is responsible and sweet at once - the novella is the last glass of wine before the bottle is done, the kiss at the doorstep, the short walk home. It finds its place among all the pleasures of life that are neither here, nor there - but gently in-between.
My three favourite novellas were two, until yesterday. And now a third has joined them. It is not lonely company, but a third is welcome. I love very few books, and the ones I love transport me. I make no apologies for this. I am much moved by a sense, in the author, that a time is both passing and held, in the written word; I prefer the elegiac. My previous favourite novellas are Daisy Miller and Death In Venice. If one wishes to suggest that Miss Lonelyhearts is a novella, then so be it. So, four, then. For a full handful, my fifth would be Heart Of Darkness. In all novellas of greatness, the themes are death and love, and how they meet and undress each other.
I read A Month In The Country (1980) by J.L. Carr yesterday, on a train, from Scotland, and a remote farmhouse on a firth, where I spent a golden week-end with brilliant, beatiful poets in their youth - hurtling back to London. The weather darkened as the distance forshortened.
I am not sure how this book escaped me until now - that is one of the pleasures of reading - one never need read a book until it finds one. The time being in joint, I read it in one (motionful) sitting, and was moved. I won't summarize here - the "short novel" is less than 90 pages in my Penguin Classics edition. I simply hope you read this book some day. It opens irresistibly, for me - a young shell-shocked veteran-artisan stepping off a train in 1920s England in terrible rain on to a platform where he is to be greeted with kindness, friendship, love and discovery, even as his grotesque facial tic sets him apart as a man who has seen irremediable horrors. I am so touched by this meeting of opposites, of violence and gentleness. Then, it unfolds that the novel is a looking-back, to a lost time, and that always gets me.
It has something of A Separate Peace in it - also informed by a classical knowledge that life is passing. This book, too, is based on the carpe diem perspective. It is also a fine meditation on art, and work, friendship, desire, and faith. Carr loved Conrad, Hardy and the poems of Housman, and he manages to bring their various ways of writing, and seeing, into his own story. Like The Good Soldier, but more simply, each line is pitch-perfect, and leads to an ending of great sadness. The last line is one of the most quietly beautiful in the modern English language.
That being said, I am not entirely convinced by the figure of Mrs. Keach. As such, this is a great work, and it is Carr's masterpiece, but it is a slightly flawed one. Only slightly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Carr
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