When the news is one report of human suffering — or environmental degradation, or violation of democratic norms — after another, people might be forgiven for averting their eyes from the headlines in favor of getting a better night’s sleep. The only problem: In a democracy, tuning out means giving the foxes full run of the henhouse.
In recent years, I’ve been looking for a solution to this conundrum. How is it possible to be a well-informed citizen and simultaneously a calm, mostly cheerful, more or less sane human being?
The closest thing I’ve found to a workaround is the right dosing. I follow the news during daylight hours. At night, I read a book.
Sometimes it’s a poetry collection I can finish in an evening. Sometimes it’s a memoir or a thick, juicy novel that will carry me through a week or two. Often it’s an essay collection, a genre which comes with those lovely, built-in stopping places that make it easier to close the book and avert a wrestling match with the clock.
But more and more I find myself picking up a novella or a short novel, something I can read in full on a rainy Sunday afternoon or in the lamplight hours between supper and bedtime. This has nothing to do with any kind of reading log or yearly numbers goal. I am not an ambitious reader. I am a slow reader, and that’s a serious liability for someone who loves books and is running out of years.
I attribute my plodding ways to having spent four years studying Latin, an inflected language that requires reading one word at a time, “not eyeful by eyeful,” as my Latin professor was fond of saying. I long ago lost my ability to read Latin, but I still read word by word, a habit I formed when time felt limitless. I can hardly imagine that feeling now.
A full-size novel is a shaggy beast, often wild and uncontained. In their spareness, novellas and short novels — I’m counting any story longer than about 80 pages and any novel shorter than about 200 — reward a word-by-word reading. This form combines the gift of poetry, with its often compressed, elliptical language; the short story, with its tight narrative propulsion; and the novel, with its expansive cast and wandering ways.
Short books offer something to read when you want to surrender to a story for longer than an hour, but not for days and days. They are hefty enough to immerse yourself in and often short enough to finish before midnight, even with a distracted, 21st-century attention span. Even with a headline-weary mind.
Last week, WBUR’s Deborah Becker asked the Irish novelist Claire Keegan if she had any theories about the success of “Small Things Like These,” her best-selling short novel from 2020 that has just been made into a film and is the Oprah’s Book Club pick for December. “I do think that people probably are inclined towards my works because they aren’t long-winded,” Ms. Keegan answered, “and they do seem to move people.”
Even within the limited scale of a novella or a short novel, that combination of concision and emotional heft can be deployed in an immense range of subjects and styles. Nicholson Baker’s “A Box of Matches” and Alan Bennett’s “The Uncommon Reader” and Lee Smith’s “Blue Marlin” will make you laugh out loud. Sandra Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street” and Lorrie Moore’s “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?” and Alexis M. Smith’s “Glaciers” and Crystal Wilkinson’s “The Birds of Opulence” will have you pondering the fallout from your own childhood. Reckoning with the human cost of war, or of what comes to a war zone after the war? Try “Peace” by Richard Bausch or “The Typist” by Michael Knight.
Plus, the form is perfect for stories of passion. In classics like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair” and Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea,” wounding, confounding, ecstatic love is the ideal subject of the short novel. That kind of wrecking intensity is almost impossible to maintain in a longer work. Or in a life.
Where this genre can make its greatest impact, I think, is in stories that confront human evil. Someone who is too heartbroken by the world to take on “Sophie’s Choice” or “Schindler’s List” might be able to manage Lily Tuck’s new Holocaust novella, “The Rest Is Memory.” The book is exactly as harrowing as longer Auschwitz novels inevitably are, but its beautiful, spare, unflinching language and its insistence on the primacy and persistence of human dignity — and, yes, its brevity — make a brutal story more bearable.
In this time when neo-Nazis openly march on the streets of Nashville and demonstrate in Columbus, Ohio, confronting this history is nothing less than a moral responsibility. Ms. Tuck’s novella conveys a truth that is shaped by deep research, intense humanity and carefully plotted narration. If journalism is the rough draft of history, then fiction is the coherent version, the one that draws meaning from it. History without the ragged edges.
This is clearly an idiosyncratic, random and extremely incomplete list of great books. In truth, I simply wandered around my house, pulling some short novels I love from the shelves. My parameters: Is it possible to read this book in its entirety on a languorous weekend afternoon? Or in an evening or two? Increasingly, the short novel seems to me to be the ideal literary form for our tired, distracted but still story-hungry age.
Maybe the whole notion is foolish. Ours is a multifarious culture, peopled by many kinds of readers and many more kinds of non-readers, and that’s exactly as it should be in a big, loud, messy democracy. Some of y’all are out there taking heart from cozy mysteries or Victorian novels or Mary Oliver’s poems. Some of you are consoled by seed catalogs or travel brochures or Americana records or old Peanuts comic strips. Maybe you’re one who needs them all, in endless combinations, just to get through these dark nights.
So take my advice with a heaping helping of skepticism. But if you have not yet found a source of solace that makes the long winter nights feel shorter, or at least not quite so dark, then turn off the machines and set your chair next to a good lamp. If you like to underline beautiful passages, keep a pen nearby. In a small book with each perfect word in its perfect place, feel your own sorrows fade as you surrender to the spell of a story.
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