At some point in my education—could have been 5th grade or sometime in college—I learned that Edgar Allen Poe believed that a great short story should be written to suit one single reading session. This would explain his affinity for the form, and his great ability to conjure up dread in a matter of a few flips of the page.
Ever since hearing that adage, I’ve derived a similar credo for myself. A short story between zero and five pages is preferred, ten pages are great if it warrants it, fifteen pages or more, and the story really needs to really earn its length.
But there are always outliers, and that’s why I try not to be so strict with my judgments. While I agree that the best short stories should be read in one sitting, there are exceptions. Melville’s “Bartleby,” for instance, is somewhere between a short story and a novella. A “novelette” I’ve heard from some (the term rubs me the wrong way). I think the word means a good, long, short story, or a good, short, novella. “Bartleby” benefits from two or three reading sessions, I feel. It’s wrong to rush it.
What interests me about short fiction is that it forces me to ask another complicated artistic question: why write novels? What is the value of a novel when a short story could do the same themes justice? Recently I was reading Denis Johnson’s collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden and I couldn’t fathom why the same author would write novels. What could he do in those that he can’t do in these instantly classic short stories?
Two years ago I read War and Peace and it was one of the worst books I’ve ever sat through.
Now, with a renowned world-master like Tolstoy, I know it’s absurd to say that about his novel, but it’s true. The quality of the book did not suffer because of the content, however, so much as the length. It really was just too long. And after 1000 pages of the main character—I can’t be bothered to look up his name—Peter or Pyotr maybe? How do I not remember after 1400 pages? Anyways, for 1000 pages Tolstoy keeps describing him as a fat loser, like, constantly reminding us “He is very fat, reader. Like, he is very fat.” And then after 1000 pages Tolstoy, grandmaster of fiction says, “And he got skinny. Now he’s a good guy.” At a certain point, you stop seeing the book as a commentary on War and Peace and more of a metafictional commentary on justifying a mediocre, melodramatic story.
But take Tolstoy’s short fiction: they consist of short fables, parables, and realistic bits of spiritual fiction so profound it’s hard to believe he also wrote a 1400-page long book about a fat guy losing weight. “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” impacted me before I could even understand its full gravity. You come across a section like this:
Ivan Ilyich wanted to weep, wanted to be caressed and wept over, and then comes his colleague, the judge Shebek, and instead of weeping and caressing, Ivan Ilyich makes a serious, stern, profoundly thoughtful face and, by inertia, gives his opinion on the significance of a decision of the appeals court and stubbornly insists on it. This lie around and within him poisoned most of all the last days of Ivan Ilyich's life.
With that, you know you are in the presence of a terse master of story, character development, thematic depth, and mastery over language. It confounds me that his novels are so highly regarded when his short fiction achieves what those novels sought, but in a fraction of the space and with double the psychological depth.
I find something similar, though less egregious in Flannery O’Connor. Her novels are masterful, but her short stories will last as long as the English language. The character development in a story like “Good Country People,” outshines Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away. From a formal perspective, I can’t find the advantages of her novels over her short stories.
I think most would say that the artistic function of novels focuses more on plot and character development than short stories, but I don’t think that’s true. Even a Hemingway story you read in school like “A Clean, Well Lighted Place” possesses just as much character “development” as his novels.
Short stories, by nature of their history perhaps, derive the same form as folk tales: they end with a moral, a revelation, a sudden discovery. But novels do the same, of course, just read any Agatha Christie book. Why should a mystery be 300 pages and not 30? It’s not clear to me.
However, there is something to be said about character development in novels taking place “over time” rather than “over pages.” This is why I think Les Miserables and the works of Dickens are indispensable as novels, per se. Les Miserables, without all the “fluff” as so many call it, is a melodramatic mess. But when you are forced to get to know a character like Jean Valjean inside and out, over the course of many, many, actual hours of your life, you gain something no short story can truly emulate. The empathy that only arrives with real-world hours being poured into something.
Similarly, Dickens' masterworks necessitate length (even A Christmas Carol). There’s a short story somewhere in Bleak House, but it is a very bad short story. When drawn out, given true form to the interweaving and interlocking narrative, Bleak House transcends its central plot of legal mystery and becomes the defining portrait of an era and an incomparable work of art.
TV shows are our novels and movies are our short stories. A long, serialized drama can develop a character not just through writing, but through real time spent watching them, watching their actor age, watching them evolve from one season to the next.
Borges is a writer’s writer. If I were to make a monument to my favorite authors, Borges would be there without a doubt. He left us no novels, only short fiction; stories, fables, prose-poems. My favorite remains “Tlon Uqbar” from Ficciones. I love it because it’s entertaining. But I also love it because it does something that only stores of that length can do—something that I only ever encounter when someone tells me a story before bed, on a drive, or during a thoughtful conversation. He writes stories that feel like an old friend telling you something in passing; they are in a rush, but what they have to tell you is of the utmost importance. They will not spare any details but they will not waste your time.
Time is the great commodity, and whether or not authors realize it, a large part of their job is justifying the act of reading. As a teacher, I hear a question I myself used to ask a lot, too: “Why read a book when I could read a summary? Wouldn’t I get the same info?”
The same info, yes. But the experience of reading, so temporal and consuming, can achieve things through a great writer that no summary or Wikipedia article can ever deliver. It’s difficult to talk about because it’s so experiential.
Like many people, I criticize myself for not reading more. The thought of picking up a long book means risking a War and Peace, but it could be a Bleak House or a Les Miserables. And yet there are other options, like short fiction just as powerful, full of brief delights and flashes of wisdom, empathy, and light.
