The best novellas you should read (but probably haven’t)

There are three novellas collected in the volume titled Legends of the Fall. The first two, Legends of the Fall and Revenge, you almost certainly know from their movies. The third story, The Man Who Gave Up His Name, everyone ignores and it’s the one I recommend. In the story Nordstrom leaves his lucrative job, dances alone at night, goes to New York, battles a drug dealer, and ends up in the Florida Keys as a chef, dancing again. I love this story because I love Harrison’s use of language. His sentences attack. But mostly I love this story because it’s about a man struggling to find his place in life. That’s a situation I like to throw my characters into: reinvention, for good or bad. And the story of my own life.

Everybody knows Ahab, but do you know Bartleby? It’s a strange story about a strange man, which, of course, attracts me. Bartleby is a lawyer’s copyist who decides he doesn’t want to do this sort of writing anymore and meets every instruction with the words: I would prefer not to. You can read Bartleby as simply a humorous tale. Or you can read it as a story of the existential crisis most writers, myself included, face at one time or the other. Melville was feeling dissatisfied with his choice of a writing career—the critics were unfriendly—and, in my opinion, the title character reflects this. It’s also, in my view, an implicit critique of economic control in America—my SDS youth would approve! It’s not for nothing that the story’s final words are: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”

If you need inspiration to write strange stories, then read the Brazilian Machado de Assis. In his photos he looks like a prim and proper gentleman, giving no hint he wrote some of the whackiest fiction you’ll ever encounter—for example, one story is told from the perspective of a needle. The Alienist is a favorite. Bacamarte, a man devoted to science, opens an insane asylum in the town of Itaguaí, taking in the mentally ill. But his scientific mind leads him to the inevitable conclusion that he must also include healthy people who, according to his diagnosis, are about to go crazy. Soon, his asylum, Casa Verdi, accommodates the entire town. Then, in the ending of the story… Well, you’ll have to read it yourself to find out. 

And speaking of whacky, we come now to this 40-year-old story of a lonely suburban housewife, Dorothy, who undertakes a romance with a sea monster named Larry, an escapee from a research institute who shows up in her kitchen one day. That sounds like the plot of a weird B-movie, but in fact the novella is a work of feminist literature while also being a heartbreaking story of two characters who find themselves unable to escape their pasts but manage to achieve a species of healing. The writing is straightforward but conceals a great deal, an important lesson for me when I first read this.

This is a novella of social criticism, exposing the economic realities of America and the suffering they both allow and produce. (That, at least, is my take on it.) And though it was first published in 1911 by a writer, Edith Wharton, better known for her novels of manners, the social criticism remains valid today. (Which, again, is my take on both the novella and the state of America today.) In Mattie, Ethan envisions his best hope of escape from a miserable marriage and endless drudgery, but she ends up a cripple. Then Wharton won’t let her die; she keeps her alive and suffering. Ah, America. (Also, as a side note, when I first read this many, many years ago, I decided never to go sledding again. Read it and find out why.)