The Novella

It is neither particularly long nor is it notably short, its size intruding into your awareness after you have finished it.  By then, the impact of it has extracted envy from you with the deft skill of a pickpocket filching your wallet.  You are scarcely aware it is there, until it no longer is there but rather a ghostly presence, a reminder of times you slept alone in a bed you had recently shared with another.

They seem to come from a different place than their longer or shorter brothers and sisters, their inspiration more solidly steeped in whim or the mystical integrity of pure length than of matrix.  Were you to have written one and spoken of it by generic name rather than title, the expressions on the faces of those to whom you confessed your deed would instantly convince you of your sin in calling it thus.  "Why would you call it that?" as though you'd used some harsh racial epithet.  It is, in its similar way, not spoken of in the same hushed tones as a novel, which term slips liquidly through the lips like a drop of single-malt liquor.  And were you to say short story, you could easily be greeted with the stern judgement of reserve, the understood nod of sympathy sometimes afforded those who adopt children because they cannot have their own.  You wrote a short story because you could not write a nov-el.

Why would you want to write a novella?  (Why, you wonder, did John Steinbeck want to write Of Mice and Men, or Philip Roth Good-bye Columbus?)  Isn't a novella the literary equivalent of a premature baby?  Or the embarrassment set loose when a dark-skinned child appears within a sparkling white family?

You imagine two copyeditors at coffee break, wondering if Bartelby, the Scrivener is rendered in quotes or italic.  And of course that mischievous Truman Capote knew all along the fuss he'd set loose with Breakfast at Tiffany's, but wasn't he a bit--hostile?  Did James M. Cain intend The Postman Always Rings Twice to be a real book, then run out of gas?  Didn't he forego the obligatory sex scene between Frank and Cora so that he could simply have Frank, as narrator, say, "I parked the car by a clump of trees and we did plenty."?

Well, Faulkner was different, the critics would say; The Bear wasn't a novella; it was a short story that he lengthened so as not to call attention to it.  And what of The Old Man and the Sea?  Or that other American Nobel laureate, Bellow something-or-other? Seize the Day, wasn't it?  An afternoon's work.

Learning experiences, perhaps.  Yes?  Guided Tours of Hell was Francine Prose, working her way into the real thing, and Nathaniel West got himself tied up with Hollywood worse even than Fitzgerald.  No wonder Miss Lonelyhearts was so short.

But then there is Jim Harrison, who writes novellas as though they were messages from Heaven, and these are only American writers of the novella, there is Asia and there is Europe, and there is that mysterious continent of Incas and llamas and a river named January, and a country named after silver...

P is for Partner

partner--a co-worker or confidante with whom a protagonist can exchange ideas and background; a relationship between protagonist and antagonist suggestive of a dramatic symbiosis if not an actual partnership; a love-hate relationship between two characters.

One of the earlier partnerships, the master and the slave in Aristophanes The Frogs, sets the potential for dramatic symbiosis in motion. The lead player is Dionysus, accompanied by his slave, Xanthias, who is clearly the more pragmatic and gritty of the two. The major goal of the story is to repair the state of tragedy in drama. As Dorothy Gale would do some time later when she traveled to Oz for information from the wizard, Dionysus must travel to Hades to bring the great tragedian Euripides back from the dead. In discussing how to best begin their task, Dionysus and Xanthias engage in what has become known as the buddy system, reminiscent of the comedy teams who followed them over the milenia: Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Rowan and Martin, the Smothers Brothers, Burns and Allen.

Partnership of some sort in story is too much a convention to be considered merely an interesting coincidence; it was absolutely essential for Sherlock Holmes who, had he been allowed by Conan Doyle to go it alone, would not have got far, thanks to his attitude and tone. Captain Ahab could have ruminated to Starbuck about the way his life had been shattered by the great whale, but the story would have not achieved its stature without the actual presence of Moby-Dick, a partnership made in the hell of Ahab's psyche. Nor would Santiago, the protagonist of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, been complete with only the presence of Manolin, the young boy apprentice, or Santiago's friends who are mentioned but who do not appear in person. Santiago needed the huge marlin, arguably the biggest catch of his life, as a partner, just as Ahab needed the whale.

To extend the metaphor of partnership in yet another direction, imagine Macbeth as unmarried, a middle-aged soldier who'd focused entirely on his military career. With no Lady Macbeth in the story, several dimensions fall away, leaving the mere carcass of a powerful drama.

In the more modern setting of Boston, private investigator Patrick Kenzie and his girlfriend-partner Angie Gennaro provide a moving thematic thread to the investigation of an abducted four-year-old girl, moving Dennis Lehane's Gone Baby Gone from being merely an intriguing puzzle, and into the landscape of deep moral inquiry.

The danger of not having a partner takes the writer directly into the murky landscape of one character on stage alone, having nowhere to go with dramatic information but the interior monologue, which often drags forth such weary tropes as How had it all begun? and What would she do now?

Such remarkable fiction as Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (in which the protagonist has Tourette's Syndrome), or Mark Haddon's The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time (where the fifteen-year-old protagonist suffers from severe autism and in a sense "communicates" with his favorite character, Sherlock Holmes) are notable exceptions, using the first-person point of view to move them beyond the need for a partner.

But here we are again, with Mark Schluter, the twenty-seven-year-old protagonist of Richard Powers' The Echo Maker, involved in a near-fatal accident that causes severe brain trauma, inducing the Capgrass Syndrome. Victims of this affliction tend to question the authenticity of those closest to him. Accordingly, a perfect partner for Schluter is his older sister, Karin, who gives up a good job to care for him, all the while aware that her brother does not believe she is really the person she claims to be.

Here I come, worthy or not: Notes on the Worthy Opponent

worthy opponent--a character whose personal and/or organizational interests run antithetical to the protagonist of a novel or short story; an individual of significant enough stature to insure a sense of fear in the reader that the protagonist will either lose outright or have to relinquish some of the prize.

The concept of shooting fish in a barrel comes to mind when considering the dynamics of the worthy opponent. It would take a poor shot indeed to miss hitting at least one fish thus constrained. By extension, an antagonist who is made to seem evil for its own sake or merely contrary for the sake of being contrary prove no real threat to the protagonist or the reader, leaving additional metaphors such as paper tiger or tempest in a teapot to hover over the story.

An ideal opponent for a protagonist in a story is a person in his or her own way every bit bigger than life than the protagonist, a person of steely desire and purpose, equipped with such tools as a brilliant sense of humor, an obvious intelligence, adaptability, charm, and that great catch-all, people skills.

The goal is to provide the worthy opponent with enough clout that the outcome of the story is in doubt to the very end. A plausible opponent is one who might, in a mystery, outwit the detective; win the heart of the protagonist in a romance; supply superior magic in a fantasy; have a grittier social/existential problem than the protagonist in a YA novel; have loftier motives than the protagonist in a science fiction novel. There is no genre in which an unworthy opponent would be more welcomed than one with some interesting, intriguing dimension.

We may begin historically with Achilles and Hector in The Iliad, where it is still possible to root for Hector against the anointed hero, Achilles; then we can move to a trope in which a personified Nature presents a worthy opponent, first as the whale in Moby-Dick, then as the marlin in The Old Man and the Sea. To be sure, there is Dr. Moriarty, standing against Sherlock Holmes, emphasizing the common denominator here--a worthy opponent plausibly stands between the protagonist and the protagonist's goals.

In the original Star Trek TV series, the Romulan commander tells Capt. Kirk, "I regret that we meet in this way. You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend." In the TV drama, The Wire, Omar Little was heard to observe, "A man got to have a code." Little had such a code, lived by it, and in tropes reminiscent of Greek tragedy, died by it. Another splendid example of worthiness in opponents also appeared in The Wire, where the characters of Avon Barksdale and Russell "Stringer" Bell were school chums, then loving partners in a flourishing Baltimore drug trade before a clash of philosophy led each to action that betrayed the other.

One of the dividing lines between the worthy opponent and the mere opponent is fairness. The worthy opponent plays fair, in large measure because he is confident of his abilities and his cause, thus he is "allowed" to play fair. The mere opponent uses any means at his disposal to win. A helpful recipe for creating the WA: give him or her ten percent more in some relevant, thematic ability than you give the protagonist. Heat to boiling, then serve.