Ian McEwan, whose 'Sweet Tooth'
puts a metafictional twist on the spy story Photo:
Andy Paradise / Rex
Features
The Telegraph - 30 Oct 2012
Ian McEwan began his career writing sharp stories for the collection First
Love, Last Rites. Since then he has written long novels like the wartime
epic Atonement but has often returned to the novella form.
Amsterdam (under 200 pages) won the Booker in 1998 and in 2007 he was
nominated for the even more concise On Chesil Beach. Yesterday he wrote a
passionate -- well, this is McEwan, so in fact cooly analytical -- defence of
short fiction in a New Yorker blog.
In his last novel Sweet Tooth, his main character is
accused of being unmanly when he publishes a short work. (Is this, I wonder,
something to do with the word novella? How it sounds like the feminine form of
novel?) But, as McEwan rightly says, no one complains that a Beethoven sonata or
a Schubert Lieder aren't symphonies. He cites Thomas Mann, Henry James, Leo
Tolstoy and Herman Melville as masters of the small scale.
Presumably he chose these writers because they are most famous for their
behemoths. Has everyone who has tried Moby-Dick also searched for Billy Budd? Will a reader turn to War
and Peace ignorant of The Death of Ivan Illych?
McEwan has a point. "How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and
thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a
third the length." Even Flaubert, he says, should have shortened Emma Bovary's
death scene.
A novella is like a film. Both are consumable in under three hours: an
evening's work. They fit so much more neatly into our busy lives.
McEwan ends his piece by saying he thinks Joyce's story The Dead
worthy of any 15 pages in Ulysses. But Ulysses started off as a
short story and grew into something monumental and wildly creative.
True there is something slightly embarassing about a Proust or a Vikram Seth or a David Foster Wallace: do they have to take up so much space? But while we can see an exhibition in an afternoon or listen to an opera in an evening or read On Chesil Beach in an hour, no work of art lingers like a great long novel.
True there is something slightly embarassing about a Proust or a Vikram Seth or a David Foster Wallace: do they have to take up so much space? But while we can see an exhibition in an afternoon or listen to an opera in an evening or read On Chesil Beach in an hour, no work of art lingers like a great long novel.
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