Weekly Readings #86 (09/25/23-10/01/23)

symptomatically bewildering

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week I published my regular reading round-up, September Books, with capsule reviews of Chekhov, Nietzsche, David Mitchell (again), and two books of the Bible. I also published “The Mothers,” bringing to a conclusion Part Two of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. In response to its climactic monologue, one reader said only, letting the simplicity speak for itself, “Bravo.” Part Three—the scherzo and the madness of this novel—begins Wednesday. Who is Ash del Greco? And what would a banned-book YA novel about gender and the internet look like if it were written by a consortium of Dostoevsky, DeLillo, and the heresiarchs of Uqbar? As Major Arcana rejoins the 21st century following Part Two’s turn through the late 20th, you won’t have to wonder. Please subscribe today!

For today, a two-part post: the first, repurposing, updating, and expanding a since-deleted advertisement for myself on my now-defunct Medium account, reflects on the novella and lists some of my favorite examples; the second imports for Substack a few more reflections on contemporary politics and Bronze Age Pervert, two topics I’m not dying to talk about, but my thoughts on which readers have demanded. Please enjoy!

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Short Form: Celebrating the Novella

My aforementioned September Books post led to a comment thread about the novella as a form and a request that I write more about it. Unfortunately, I have no theory of the novella, despite having written a few. Randall Jarrell’s famous joke definition of the novel seems to work just as well for the novella: in Jarrell’s words, it is “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.”¹

My own novellas have nothing in common with one another in form or sensibility. The Ecstasy of Michaela is a semi-mystery written under the influence of Dorian Gray-ish neo-Gothic Decadence as applied to the post-industrial American landscape of my youth, with perhaps also a hint of Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49. Right Between the Eyes is a hyper-dense, extremely compressed multi-character novel, a novel in suggestive scenes without tiresome elaboration. The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, given its emphasis on dialogue in a confined space, is essentially a play or screenplay; except for some of the final scenes, which might require special effects, you could stage it tomorrow.

I remembered after the comment thread that I’d written a post for my old Medium account about the virtues of the novella and about some of my own favorites. I wrote it in 2021 as a kind of ad for Quarantine. I deleted that post when I moved from Medium to Substack, so I’m going to paste it in here. In case you’ve read it already, though, I have expanded the list of great novellas by about a third, to include novellas I have since written about at length. Please excuse the punchy, slightly “advertorial” tone of the introduction.²

In Praise of Novellas

Why did I write a novella and not a full-length novel? The novella has been “having a moment” off and on for the last decade (I haven’t written the only “In Praise of Novellas” article), but I can’t blame trendiness. Many years ago, a “meme” in the original Web 1.0 sense—what I think YouTubers now call a “tag”—circulated among bookish denizens of Livejournal (to give you an idea how many years ago I mean) canvassing our literary tastes. One of the questions: Epic or novella? I remember thinking it was a strange questions—why choose between forms so utterly different?—and many years of reading later I still have trouble with the question. I’m exaggerating for effect, but my favorite works of fiction are either epics or novellas.

Your world-recording and world-making ambitions should either be so great that it can scarcely be contained by 500 pages, or you should whet your chosen philosophical conflict, aesthetic mood, and/or character study down to a 100-page edge. Perhaps the 300-page novel has become either formulaic or programmatic, at least for literary fiction. Even truly great 300-page novels often feel either too long or too short: Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses canters on for 50 pages after we’ve gotten the point, while Toni Morrison’s Paradise leaves too many byways in its town and rooms in its convent unexplored. Novellas and epics: for me, the most ideal forms of fiction.

(Though I often think the already vague and porous definition of novella should expand to contain works over 50,000 words but still noticeably shorter than your average 90,000-word novel, such as The Scarlet Letter or Mrs. Dalloway. Doesn’t a 60K-word work have more in common with a 50K-word one than a 200K-word one?)

The attractions of the novella for the proverbial common reader should be obvious. Novellas are ideal for mobile reading, both digital and analog, whether because you can read one on your phone over two or three lunch breaks or because you can carry a print copy in your back pocket. They even create a sense of confidence and accomplishment—surely reading a 100-page book is still reading a book!—for readers with an eye on their Goodreads count. There’s also an appealingly countercultural edge to the novella in our era of the binge, whether we are binge-watching prestige TV or binge-reading Knausgaard. Novellas, finally, can be a less intimidating way to get acquainted with authors who have a fearsome or formidable reputation: you can start with Bartleby, not Moby-Dick; The Dead, not Ulysses; Death in Venice, not The Magic Mountain.

For writers, the attractions of the form can be just as great. Telling a story that is varied but cohesive in tone and convincingly populated in 10,000 to 50,000 words instils discipline, inspires concision, and builds self-assurance. Shorter forms of all kinds can also serve as a laboratory to experiment with styles, genres, archetypes, and points of view that you aren’t sure would work at greater length. And novellas, with their briefer compass, allow writers to focus more closely on prose, whether the goal is faithful realism or stylized artifice, a priority that sometimes goes missing when you’re trying to hold 100,000 words’ worth of plot and characters in mind.

For both readers and writers, the diverse publishing platforms of today make the novella more viable than ever. If the magazine market that supported the genre’s emergence and heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has evaporated, the novella is still a perfect form for both partisans of the well-designed artist’s book or for ease of e-reading. To celebrate this sometimes neglected form, I offer this lightly annotated list, arranged by authorial surname, of some of the best novellas I’ve discussed at my website over the years.

The Medium post’s original illustration.

César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
A hallucinatory journey across the lightning-struck 19th-century Pampas that raises and even sometimes answers every philosophical question you’ve ever asked about art’s relation to life.

Jayinee Basu, The City of Folding Faces
A poet’s kaleidoscopic science-fiction dream, a semi-surreal love story of shifting and elaborating identities with all the texture of 21st-century metropolitan life.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
With some claim on being called the inaugural work of English-language modernism, Conrad’s brief epic maps at once the imperial world that would become the globalized one, and the fractured European psyche that would become everyone’s.

Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
A pitiless objet d’art wrought from and offered in tribute to the agonies of the late-19th century New York underclass; no writer today would dare.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Counter-Enlightenment philosophy, social realism, and psychological modernism together explode in this treatise-parable of Russia’s—and the unconscious mind’s—failed modernization.

Christopher Isherwood, Prater Violet
An eloquent coming-of-age tragicomedy in which a budding English writer is hired to work on an insipid commercial movie with a radical Austrian Jewish filmmaker during the rise of Nazism.

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
The ultimate ghost story for the hermeneutic of suspicion, in which the specters may or may not just be everything you have left out of your account of yourself—an insight abetted by the prose of late James at his most arch. 

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
A heartfelt and sometimes almost mythical travelogue commemorating the vanishing lifeworld of the late-19th-century Maine seacoast.

James Joyce, The Dead
The culminating narrative of Dubliners contains Joyce’s most generous portrait of Ireland, the missed connections in a marriage, and canonical debates about the responsibility of intellectuals and artists to the oppressed and to the polis.

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
This poignantly grotesque tragicomedy about a literal bugman is the canonical allegory of modern alienation, all the better in that we never quite know what the allegory is of.

Nella Larsen, Quicksand
A subtle and ironic psychological study of of an African- and Danish-American woman questing for freedom from the Deep South to Denmark to Renaissance-era Harlem.

Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd
A Möbius-strip of a poet’s narrative braiding contemporary Mexico City with modernist New York, life with death, maternity with art, featuring cameos by Ezra Pound, Nella Larsen, Federico García Lorca, and more.

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Mann gives us Platonic pederasty, ancient tragedy, and Oriental infection and/as the final theory of art in a prose of paradoxically regal decadence.  

Herman Melville, Billy Budd
A tragedy of law’s conflict with justice set on an allegorical ship roiling with concealed passions in revolutionary times, written in a cunning and coiled style that makes the text as ambiguous as its characters.

Toni Morrison, Sula
A half-century chronicle of a small black town in Ohio, a magic-realist myth of two archetypal characters’ loves and losses centered on female friendship, a counterintuitive inquiry into the nature of good and evil.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
A paranoid, cryptic, paronomasiac, absurdist, moving quest for the meaning of America across the strange landscape of a California underworld pledged to all the meanings “freedom” might have.

Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus
A comic cross-class romance whose narrator, a bookish young man from a working-class Jewish family, is shocked to dazzling omni-observance by the wealthier milieu of his new girlfriend; a relationship fails, but a writer is born.

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
A sometimes comic, sometimes uncanny, always dreamily vivid ghost story encompassing decades of Mexican history as a chorus of the dead narrates the eponymous anti-hero’s rise and fall.

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
A disturbing examination of post-Conradian, postcolonial eros set in a Sudanese village, as the narrator assembles the story of a neighbor who spent his academic life in England turning the metropole’s fetishes against his white lovers.

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Selective Reading: Perversion and American Politics

People want my thoughts on Bronze Age Pervert. People want parapolitics and parasociality, even from a belletrist like me. Substack personally emails you every time someone unsubscribes from your publication, and a highlight of my week is the reliable one to three free subscribers who unsubscribe every Wednesday morning immediately after I send out the Major Arcana preview. “Argghh, not literature!” I imagine them crying out in agony upon receiving the email, like a demoniac sprinkled with holy water. I am not qualified to comment on Bronze Age Pervert; I have only skimmed pirated pdfs of his two books; if he wants me to read them properly, he can send me review copies in print. Nevertheless, I think I’ve read enough to know what’s going on. Two people recently asked me on Tumblr first why I suspected that BAP is being promoted by liberal media, and second if his possible covert funding by Silicon Valley libertarians explains the peculiarities of his fandom. My answers are as follows.

Auguste Rodin, The Age of Bronze (1877)

Some of BAP’s success is organic. He’s a compelling writer and figure in his way, certainly compared to most academics, because he operates on the ever-appealing level of myth and with no little exonerating self-parody. A fellow author like Tara Isabella Burton no doubt wants a worthy adversary, and, as I discussed here, she’s able to dispatch him on his own philosophical, imaginative ground rather than resorting to a moralistic and extrinsic political critique. When the powers that be want to shut people up, though, they try their best to actually shut them up; they don’t allow them celeb profiles in Politico or ask distinguished philosophers to review their self-published books, even badly, in the New Statesman.³

I believe it’s in the interests of most of the contending factions that this appear to be the right-most position in American politics:

I want to address for a moment the “Bannonite” and “economic populist” consensus that has emerged on the dissident spheres so-called of the right for the last few years, and which is now being pushed in its major zines and publications acting as the public voice of a supposed “resistance.” It is because of the widespread acceptance of this orthodoxy — really a set of unexamined talking points — that the right increasingly sounds like a version of Chomskyite Marxoid professor in cheap tuna-stained blazer, droning on about the IMF, the WEF, Neoliberalism, the supposed problem of “hypercapitalism” and Capital, “atomization,” “destruction of native and traditional communities”; while stomping with a kind of self-important frisson for “an engagement with socialism,” “class analysis,” “postracial multiracial working class democracy,” as if these things were the newest and most revolutionary ideas and as if there was a genuine prospect of being the vanguard of millions of urban proletarians against the bourgeois “Anglo Liberal” order.

The Catholic social democrats get to point at this monster on their right so that they themselves can appear to be the soul of moderation; the Silicon Valley libertarians get their ideology culture-washed, cleansed of its appalling nerdism and decked out instead in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Conrad, doing lines off Dasha’s bare back; and the libs and left-libs get to say that if you let these people have their way they are, as the current president once piquantly said in a similar context, “gonna put y’all back in chains.” The only people who don’t want BAP in the spotlight are his nearest rivals, those actually carrying the standard of right-wing populism, to the extent that they are sincerely doing so, as, for example, this from today:

Too many of these guys seem to want George W. Bush’s policies, minus the war and the minorities. Count me out. The old guard’s economic agenda is a complete dead end. “Cato Institute, but whites only” is morally and politically stupid.

There’s definitely Thiel money or whatever other money in that scene, but I don’t believe “dark funding” creates culture ex nihilo. It’s too close to the parapolitical left’s and the traditionalist right’s shared “brainwashing” model of modern culture, where if it weren’t for the meddling CIA we’d have had wholesome paintings of workers (or of families) instead of spattered canvases and colored squares, or the continued production of proletarian novels (or religious ones) instead of psychosexual realism, or Marxist sociological (or Christian theological) analyses of literature instead of Nietzschean deconstructions. As if modernism and its sequelae were just some kind of scam foisted on a too-trusting public and not the actual discovery of possibilities always latent in art and thought. BAP’s cult sensibly wants to take libertarianism, divorce it from the superannuated Moral Majority worldview it was forced to wed in the late 20th century, and remarry it instead to more vital energies in modern culture represented metonymically, not to say stereotypically, by what’s “gay” (i.e., “against nature” rather than obedient to “natural law”) and what’s “Jewish” (i.e., diasporic and cosmopolitical rather than settled and statist), whatever Alamariu’s own personal sexual preferences or ethnic-religious heritage. In that way, and assuming there will continue to be both a left and a right in the near term, then the phenomenon might represent a genuine advance for the American right, and a partially organic from-below one given the collapse of Reaganism’s libertarian-Christian alliance—except that it still relies on the tedious abjection of everything “black” and “female,” whereas the final stage in the maturation of right non-statism will be to integrate these into its cosmopolitics (read Toni Morrison, I might suggest to these people, you’ll actually enjoy her), just as the final stage in the maturation of left non-statism is, conversely, to integrate more socially traditional elements like warrior, priest, and mother rather than just barking “fascist” at them or else deploying them with reckless unconsciousness, as with the hapless warriors of CHAZ. (That non-statism is the highest form of utopian, which is to say aesthetic, politics on “both sides,” I take for granted, though the state is still needed for now in our ongoing non-utopia to build infrastructure or provision the poor or what have you.) I don’t intend this as a defense of BAP—I haven’t read either of his books in full; what I did read was deplorable, hateful, etc.—just a more comprehensive explanation of why he happened than that dark money paid for him to happen. My sense of how these things work is dramatized in Part Two of Major Arcana, by the way, when the CIA guy shows up to the comic-book company’s office and finds to his complacent satisfaction that material the agency can work with is already underway, produced organically by an artist immersed in the developmental logic of art. The best the money-men can do is work with the grain, not against it. Anyone who wants to resist is advised to do the same: immanent critique, starting from (not against) the object to be overcome and transforming it from the inside out. With enough imagination, you can take literally anything and make it the Old Testament to your New—the Catholic Church took Virgil as surely as it took Isaiah, and it will, as I’ve suggested, eventually take Nietzsche, too, if it wants to live at all, which the current pontiff, because he knew Borges, perhaps understands better than anyone—even if its own authors vainly conceived of their word as the last.⁴

1. As I point out in the comment thread, the novella also has a number of related terms or synonyms, none of which themselves are defined (or definable) with any precision: novelette, nouvelle, short novel, long short story, etc. I am reminded of the bratty footnote in my doctoral dissertation where I dismissed the “symptomatically bewildering” fake exactitude of narratological terminology.

2. The thread also includes the phrase “Bolaño-talk.” I would be remiss, then, wouldn’t I, not to include 21st-century literature’s great denunciation of the excess attention paid to novellas by readers avoidant of monumental masterpieces. The passage occurs in one such monumental masterpiece, 2666, and is all the more persuasive coming from an author who in such works as Distant Star, Amulet, and By Night in Chile mastered the short form as well as the long. Ostensibly, this is from one character’s POV and not the novelist’s, but the experienced reader, and still more the experienced writer, knows when the voice of the author can be heard raging behind the character.

Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who…clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

I have more sympathy for this passage now than I would ever have had before, because of my long novel in progress, Major Arcana, the composition of which requires precisely the kind of combat Bolaño describes, even if I also more gently intend it as a cathedral vast enough for everyone to live inside.

3. The implied contrast is with figures like Alex Jones and Russell Brand. To say so is not to endorse them, and I do not, only to observe that the regnant powers actually treat them like enemies by trying to suppress them, not like tolerable gadflies or “loyal opposition,” the way they treat far-right libertarians like BAP or Richard Hanania, or, on the other side, the way they treat academic Marxists and anarchists. If they thought of BAP the way they think of Jones and Brand, they would be pressuring Amazon not to carry his books. I am a free-speech absolutist myself and reject all such suppression techniques as applied to anyone.

4. Much as I make fun of Euro avantists for writing novels without paragraph breaks, sometimes I, too, will come out with an endless paragraph, both in fiction and non-. (Diane del Greco’s aforementioned monologue in the most recent chapter of Major Arcana is a fictional example.) I do this when I’d like people to read with special care.