by Carrie Milford
Stewart O’Nan didn’t begin his career as a novelist. In fact, after graduating with a B.S. from Boston University, he worked as a test engineer for Grumman Aerospace Corporation for four years. But, urged by his wife, he eventually earned his M.F.A. from Cornell in 1992. His first book, a collection of short stories entitled In The Walled City, was published by The University of Pittsburgh Press and won the 1993 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Since then, O’Nan has written 12 novels, including Snow Angels, Wish You Were Here, and Songs for the Missing, as well as two works of nonfiction and a screenplay.
All of his works of fiction, excluding In the Walled City, are marketed as novels, but several, such as Last Night at the Lobster, A Prayer for the Dying, and The Speed Queen are all shorter novels that verge on the novella category. O’Nan was gracious enough to answer a few questions about his take on the novella form and how his work fits into it.
What do you think makes a work of fiction a novella and not a short novel or a long short story? Is it just length, or something more?
I’ll say it’s just length. Some stories can cover more time than novellas, or even novels (Alice Munro has a bunch, as does Joyce Oates), and some novellas cover more inner territory and go deeper than many novels, so I think it’s just a term of convenience for some. Why not just call them short novels, if that’s what the suffix -ella is about?
Many novellas seem to cover a short time span. Breakfast at Tiffany’s comes to mind, for example. Last Night at the Lobster seems to fall into this category as well, covering just one day in Manny’s life, yet it is called a novel. Do you think of it as a novel and not a novella, and if so, why?
I always thought of Last Night at the Lobster as a novel—and in fact it started as a massive novel that used that night simply as a holding space for the characters to then spin their tales forward and backward in time, like The Canterbury Tales. It was going to run around 700 pages and include the war in Iraq, video game addiction and all kinds of American craziness, but finally I saw whose story it really was and decided to go small and quiet. It fits the (loose) criteria for a novella, pagewise, but, practically, I saw it as a stand-alone short novel. As a novella, it would have been subject by publishers to being combined with one or more other short novels or a bunch of short stories, which would drain it of its power. I needed it to stand alone and was lucky that Viking agreed to publish it that way.
A Prayer for the Dying is another of your shorter novels that seems to verge on being a novella. Do you feel that it is a novel and not a novella? Does its shorter length have anything to do with the second person narrator?
A Prayer for the Dying came in around 150 pages in manuscript, which is probably more toward the novel side of the ledger, and yeah, using both the second person and the present tense made it shorter than it might have been otherwise. The difficulty there wasn’t so much the second person, since that gets easier as the book goes on, but that it’s very hard to move time in the present tense. It’s also a book that leans on an unreliable narrator, meaning you’re asking the reader to parse every word and action for meaning and truth, which can be tiring. And because I’m rendering so much in live scenes rather than summary narration, I’m already using the tools of the short story, so I knew I couldn’t go on too long without testing the reader’s patience. About another novel of mine in manuscript, Jonathan Lethem said, “It wants to be poem,” meaning that I should be lyrical and light, suggestive rather than exhaustive.
Did you feel differently when writing A Prayer for the Dying and Last Night at the Lobster versus, say, Songs for the Missing or Snow Angels? For example, was it something in the characters or the plot that caused you to write A Prayer for the Dying and Last Night at the Lobster as shorter works?
Snow Angels and Songs for the Missing have multiple POV narrators, and Snow Angels has that tricky first-person who becomes a fallible third-person mapping his desires onto others (like William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, and in an even weirder way, James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime), so those are very different from the simple third-person-omniscient/subjective of Manny in the Lobster or the more difficult but still monolithic second of Jacob in A Prayer for the Dying. In the case of the shorter books, the choice of POV essentially solved the book, or at least gave me a way in. I started A Prayer for the Dying in first person and then third person and it wouldn’t work at all. Likewise, I had a whole different scheme for what I wanted to do in Last Night at the Lobster and it was only after I gave it up and focused solely on Manny that it worked. So by simplifying and going to one POV character, I limited the scope of both projects. Whereas my third-person multiple POV books sometimes spread and sprawl, like Wish You Were Here. Also, the container and organization of both A Prayer for the Dying and Last Night at the Lobster are small and simple: we follow Jacob until the epidemic is over, hoping things go okay, just as we follow Manny until the night is over, hoping things go okay. Because both are central actors with what they think is agency, they’re always fighting to do what’s right, or think they are. In those other two books there’s a lot of misdirection, a lot of characters whose desires and fears are skewed or sideways to the action, which I think actually leads us more interesting and private/intimate places, but doesn’t always help move the story forward.
Do you have any thoughts on where the novella form is going? Will it grow in popularity or remain slightly under the radar? Do you think you’ll write novellas in the future?
Like the novel or the story, the short novel can take any form and do anything. I like it for its mix of speed and depth, but you have to be able to pull off that compression, so there probably won’t be too many popular writers working in it. That said, The Body may be the best thing Stephen King’s written, and I Was Amelia Earhardt was a monster bestseller, so who knows? I’m working on a short novel right now, so I’d better write them in the future. Like later today.
